Glocal?

I can generally classify the victims of UMNO into (1) the Malays that really screw up, (2) those that seemingly made it and (3) those that really made it on their own.

The most numerous products of UMNO are the jerks and bastards they produced via the NEP.

The most victimised however are the Malays with genuine talent that made it all on their own.

There is no dearth of talent and brains among the Malay community, just like there is no lacking of idiots and retards among the Chinese people.




Glocal?

One of the terms that really got me irritated was “Glocal” uttered by Najib Tun Razak in the 2005 UMNO General Assembly.

It remains very much an earache to listen and an eyesore to read G-L-O-C-A-L. There are so many reasons to this. Firstly, it was came from the mouth of Najib Tun Razak, the same person who in 1987 called for the keris Melayu to be bathed in Chinese blood. Back in 2005, the BN papers had ‘GLOCAL’ splashed all over their front pages, portraying it as an ingenious term coined by Najib Razak. It was later revealed to be a term stolen without due credits from an esteemed writer and thinker.

As far as I can remember, Najib Razak has never owned up to that intellectual thievery, but then again it’s not as though the glocal term went very far since 2005. Like typical poorly-formed stools, his verbal diarrhea disappeared as abruptly as it arrived.

Sometimes I wonder what UMNO politicians are really trying to achieve every year with their annual customary theatrics, grandiose sloganeering and bang-your-chest-battle-cry.

Their boastful rhetoric is always the empowerment of a supposed weak Malay race when in fact, the weak Malay race is a myth, a decoy for UMNO to enrich its cronies and continue condemning the Malays to a lifetime of unjustified hatred and misplaced jealousy towards other communities.

To a great extent, many young Malays are eating into UMNO’s lying lies, and end up wasting their potential and living in this world in a false façade.

I can generally classify the victims of UMNO into (1) the Malays that really screw up, (2) those that seemingly made it and (3) those that really made it on their own

Those That Screw Up
When statistics are difficult to come by, it is sometimes best to draw from one’s own experience. When I first started medical school, there was this chap everyone called Mat. He was never a candidate for Medicine to begin with. He was not too intelligent or overly interested to become a doctor. I really wonder why he took up Medicine in the first place or if he even applied for it. It was also the beginning of my extreme disdain for the BN government seeing how clowns like Mat got into medical school while top-scoring STPM holders are denied entry.

Truthfully, Mat was likeable as a person. He was not full of pride or hot air. He did not pretend that he entered medical school on his own accord. He was just indifferent and totally uninterested in medical studies, period. He would smoke kretek Indonesia for hours in the filthy toilets of UM and read sexy Japanese comics with no signs of exhaustion. He would minum teh and then minum more teh. He would watch Astro and even TV1 and then move on to consume some borrowed VCDs. He was doing anything but studying. Like his many Malay counterparts, he was on a full state scholarship.

We started wondering whether he was a genius in disguise. Soon enough, it became quite obvious that he was not. He never passed a single semester but somehow scraped through first year of medical school without being retained. Mat continued his ways in second year, which was much tougher than first year. He failed miserably. There was no way the university senate can assist him no matter how color-conscious the UM senate is. He dropped out after three years. He was thereafter offered a Science course after flunking medical school. I have never heard from him since, never knew if he ever went on to attain a university degree.

What I do know though is that he was given a golden opportunity many were not. In fact, he was given chances after chances to change his ways but the realization that he was wasting his life and our taxes just didn’t occur to him. He lived a life of privilege and expectation and thought these privileges would see him through. He screwed up his life in the habit of expecting leverage and in the process, ended up screwing up another person’s life. For every seat taken by a medical student, one person elsewhere was denied that opportunity. More often than not, the latter does not have a bin or binti in one’s name.

Was Mat an isolated character? Well, consider this: from the 90 Malay medical students who started first year with me, only 75 graduated and a significant number of these 75 just barely made it through the supplementary exams.

Medical school is not representative of a community I concede. There’s always Jalan Chow Kit, Bukit Bintang, Sungai Buloh Jail and the many drug detention centers and the Mat Rempits throughout the country. If social ills are equally distributed among the races, non-Malays should logically account for 45-55% of the occupants in jail and drug detention centers but they don’t. The non-Malays have their own form of damning scenarios of course but they are not in discussion here.

My point is simple: with endless opportunities to dream and achieve, many young Malays are screwing up big time, and a great part of it is because UMNO has hand-fed them so much they have forgotten how to fend for themselves.

Spare the rod and spoil the child. This ageless adage never withers.

Those That Seemingly Made It

I believe the effects of NEP are really starting to show in this generation.

Those who could never have entered university on their own merit are now pursuing postgraduate degrees. Those who were never good students are now tough-talking lecturers, or training to be one through SLAB programs. Those who were never meant to become doctors are now consultant surgeons partaking in daily slaughter and massacre. Some who failed as advocates and solicitors are now members of parliaments and ministers embarrassing the country on an unprecendented scale. One who wanted to remain as a perpetual civil servant became Prime Minister.

These are the true beneficiaries of the NEP.

They could never have made it on level playing ground. They are where they are today because of UMNO’s racist policies. They are also among the most detestable from my own working experience with them.

The Surgery Department received a new houseman recently. He was a Sabahan bumiputra – a UKM graduate just like most NEP products. He was fresh and unfamiliar with the system. No one is on their first week on the job. He committed blunders after blunders, most of which are trivial and none that was life-threatening. He apologized incessantly and showed much enthusiasm to learn. Sometimes, that’s much more important than academic brilliance.

He had jerks and bastards for superiors though – fellow UKM-NEP products just as himself, the only difference being that his bosses were born 20 years earlier than he was.

I can’t keep track of the many terrible insults and verbal abuses the house officer received over the period of a two hour surgery. Names like ‘bodoh, tidak guna, malas, memalukan, lembab’ were all over the ambience. If I were a new house officer fresh from medical school being feasted to a meal of unending insults, I doubt I could have maintained my sanity for a day.

To put it bluntly, the two UKM Malay surgeons were essentially big bullies, stupid jerks and bloody bastards. I wish I could go back in time to see how they fumbled around in their first days as house officers. I’ve worked with them before, and I can honestly testify that they are not very intelligent. There was no way they could have been what they are today had it not been for UMNO’s bigotry and UKM’s racist policies. They are now turning on their subordinates pretending and behaving as though they made it all on their own efforts.

Perhaps this was exactly what Najib Razak meant by “glocal Malays” – local NEP products trained and certified by local Malaysian standards but behave as though they have conquered the global arena.

Once again, are such characters limited to the medical fraternity? Certainly not, Malaysia is filled with these glocal characters. In the parliament, we see the uncouth Khairy Jamaludin pretending he was truly elected by the people of Rembau when in actual fact he is an election conman. In aerospace, we find our Dr. SMS pretending he is a true astronaut when all he is a costly space tourist. In movie-making, we see local films like Cicak-man and KL-drift packaged as original ideas while blatantly ripping off the fame of Spiderman and Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift. It seems to me that NEP’s best products are mostly unshameful daylight copy cats.

I have nothing against genuine affirmative action. I do however have something against beneficiaries of such affirmative action who forget their roots and take on a bully approach in life with the intention to hinder the progress of others.

Those That Really Made It On Their Own

The most numerous products of UMNO are the jerks and bastards they produced via the NEP.

The most victimised however are the Malays with genuine talent that made it all on their own.

There is no dearth of talent and brains among the Malay community, just like there is no lacking of idiots and retards among the Chinese people.

Non-Malays have a common habit of saying that even Malays themselves do not trust a Malay doctor. It really doesn’t matter whether that is actually happening but the fact it such an assumption is blantantly stupid. It is as stupid as saying one puts his full trust in the Sabah State Neurosurgeon simply because he is an Indian guy and all Indian doctors are suppose to be skilful neurosurgeons.

If I were critically ill and near death, there are many Malay doctors I will seek treatment from over the many other Chinese or Indian clinicians I work with.

My brilliant Malay colleagues will always face a stigma that they are doctors only because UMNO ‘helped’ them through the NEP. To certain degree, I can empathize with them because similarly, all Chinese and Indian doctors from local universities are assumed to be smart and capable when this is just a misplaced erroneous social stigma. Believe me when I say that.

Rather than helping these brilliant minds, UMNO has condemned them to a lifetime of unreasonable doubt and unwarranted assumptions.

Now, if only these accomplished Malay brothers will stand up and speak out……