A few days ago I went to visit my former teachers in Sri KDU, and had a good chat with Mr Masukor. At one point in the middle of an interesting talk regarding boarding school, he told me that one of his student told him that she has never known any Chinese friends before. Then he also told me that a parent of one of the Chinese student expressed her concern of having her son to stay in the same house with Malay kids, citing that her son have never known any Malay friends before. And yet we boast about being a multiracial country, that our cultural diversity is our strength, that our racial harmony is something to be proud of.

But in reality, though we live side by side, we don’t live with each other. Our racial harmony may well be a by-product of ignorance, of not caring what the other races are doing, of non-interfering and very little interaction with each other, limited to only the occasional meeting in taxis and sundry shops and checkout lanes, where even then we barely talk to each other. This is certainly nothing to be proud of. Instead of the individual races being interwoven with each other to create the very fabric of our multiracial society, it is more like separate strands of ropes that don’t even touch.

Why is this so? I believe that in part – a huge part – our education system is to blame for. For any kids, schools are the best place for them to make friends. Many of us live in a racially clustered society – the Malays live where most (if not all) of the neighbours are Malays, and the same goes for the Chinese and Indians. The only place we can really bring our kids together is at school. And yet the Chinese and Indians send their kids to vernacular schools, where the other races make up of maybe less than 5% of the population. The Malays send their sons and daughters to boarding schools, where again less than 5% of the population are of the other races. In fact, in many boarding schools, there are no Chinese or Indian students at all. Little wonder then when these Malay kids and Chinese kids and Indian kids finish school and join the larger Malaysian society, they don’t know how to react with the reality of our social fabric.

I should know this. I’ve been in boarding school since I was 13. But I had a tad more luck than many of my friends. Right after I finished SPM (and my 5 years of non-interaction with friends of other races), I did my pre-university education in a private school in Kota Damansara. Of course, due to the generally less-financially-capable Malays, it was mainly the Chinese that send their kids to the school. But due to Petronas sending its scholars to this school, it’s International Baccalaureate community is rather balanced between the races. And this close interaction with the other Chinese and Indian friends forced me to really rethink my perception towards the other races in Malaysia. After years and years of living in a closed society – living alongside my own kind – this was not easy to do. I revolted. But in time, I learned to accept our differences. In time, I understood them better.

It is an inevitable consequence that without interaction, there can be no understanding, and without understanding comes all sorts of hostility and anxiety. Conscious racial harmony is simply not possible, for how can you really accept living with other people when really, you don’t even know them. Many of my friends continued their study in boarding colleges where again, very little of the population are made up of other races than Malay. I pity them, and I wonder how they’ll turn out when they leave the education world and enter the working world.

Fixing this is not easy. There have to be a major rethinking of our national education system. The Chinese and Indians would have to give up vernacular schools. The Malays have to give up boarding schools. The national schools structure have to be revamped to include the Mandarin and Tamil languages that the Chinese and Indians will surely want their children to retain. The Malays have to recognise that quality education can exist in the national schools, especially if the boarding schools no longer drain the good brains from all these national schools. These are but a tiny portion of what have to be thought and discussed about. But if we are to have a truly multiracial Malaysia where we really live with each other, not just alongside each other, somewhere along the line it has to be done. The individual racial strings can only go their separate ways for so long before they intermingle in a tight knot, and I’m sure none of us would want that.

Every time I open my Firefox browser, I usually will do one thing before anything else: check the Twitter statuses of those I follow. Usually this takes only a few seconds as all the updates get delivered right at the bottom bar of the browser. Sometimes I reply to some tweets, sometimes I follow some links and have an interesting read. And sometimes, funny things that people tweet make me smile. And this is just one of those:

And then sometimes (like once or twice a week, maybe), I stumble around in Facebooks, answering friend requests (more like accepting, really), replying to some wall posts, or posting something on other people’s walls, or view other people photos. And yes, there bound to be something funny there too, sometimes. This is what I found this time:

Credits to Shaza Hakim for retweeting the tweet from flisterz for the Twilight Moms image, and Awie Gaucho for the Spongebob IC in Facebook, and Amira Khairuddin through whose profile I stumbled across the image.

Notice that sound in Windows whenever some error came out when using your computer? Or that short music that came out everytime you start Windows up? There’s a myriad of default sounds that came with Windows, and they accompany all sort of events that happen in your computer. And because most of us have been using only Windows OSes for our entire computing life, we have  became quite familiar with those. Some annoy us, some make our hearts beat faster, heck, some even made us swear.

But take all those sounds, add a tad of creativity and a certain supply of free time (and boredom), you’d get something else. Somebody actually combined and mixed those sounds into a song, and I have to admit it’s rather impressive (and amusing as well).

There’s a few variant of songs made entirely from Windows sounds. This particular song below is composed by a person that goes by the name Robbi-985. From what I know, he was the first person that originally created a song from Windows sounds. He used only the sounds from Windows 98 and Windows XP.

Click the play button below to listen:

You can view the original video posted by the author on YouTube.

Malays as defined by the Malaysian Constitution is a curious thing: it is not strictly a race, or an ethnic, but rather an ethno-religious group of people. That simply adds the religious component into the classification of a race that would otherwise be strictly defined and passed down through direct inheritance. According to the Malaysian Constitution, a citizen who is not a muslim is not a malay, even if his lineage traces back to as far and as old as the Malay ethnicity can be traced back to.

But it is not this definition in the Malaysian Constitution that this post will center upon, but rather, this association of religion to a certain ethnic, namely the association of Islam to the Malay ethnic. Today, at least in this country, Islam and Malay are so well-associated that whatever the Malays do, many would think that that is what Islam teaches its followers to do. That in itself presents immediate disadvantage to the religion itself, for race and religion are very different things. Ethnicity develops through time, through assimilation with the surrounding and the environment within which a certain group of people live for generations. This assimilation brings about countless adjustments and additions to how this certain group of people live their daily lives over the ages. This is what gives rise to culture. Religion, on the other hand, is based entirely on principles that  are sent down by God Himself.

When you try to assimilate these two very different sets of belief, there will no doubt be differences and conflicts. The reason why the Malay ethnic and Islam seems so well-acquainted with each other today is because Islam has been introduced to the Malays for hundreds of years. Much of the differences and conflicts has been ironed out in the past. For all practical purposes, Islam has been assimilated into the Malay’s way of life (note the order of what gets assimilated into what).

However, cultural values that precedes religion for many, many years are not easy to go away. The Malays still retain much of its cultural values today. Because (at least in Malaysia) the two are so well associated, much of what is actually Malay cultural values and rituals are mistaken to be Islamic teachings. This association is so well-ingrained that many of the Malays themselves believe a lot of these mis-attributions.

Another immediate negative effect of this assimilation is that Islamic teachings are no longer understood the way it is meant to be. Much of what is taught to the younger generations of the Malay ethnic regarding Islam is over-simplified right down to only the necessary rituals, and most of the time the core values of kindheartedness, responsibility, perseverance, and  a myriad of other values that define Islam itself gets sidelined. Parents teach their children to perform the daily prayers, read the Quran, observe fasting, but very little of the core values of Islam actually get passed down. The same pattern can be seen in the syllabus of Islamic Education taught in national schools. As a result, many Malays today perform the prayers, read the Quran and observe fasting simply because they are taught to do so instead of really understanding the reasons that belie these obligations. Without proper understanding, not only do they make Islam seems unfavourable to the other ethnicities, these obligations also become nothing more than just rigid rituals, and much of the values that once put Islam on top of the world got lost in this ritualistic rigidity.

Pardon me for the lack of new updates to this blog. I’ve been rather busy lately with university projects and workload, and still gonna be even busier now that the final exam is only a week away.

Anyways, I’ve just finished the last project for this semester, the Truss Bridge project for the Introduction to Engineering Design course in the University of Auckland. Curious to learn how to use Sony Vegas Pro (a video-making software), I’ve decided to put together this short video about the project. Enjoy!

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