My Merdeka - A Perspective
As I stood amidst the darkness from my 8th floor hotel room in Port Klang watching continuous and seemed-contagious fireworks display by the harbour, my mind wandered around searching for the meaning of this so-called Golden Jubilee Celebration of Malaysia’s Nationhood. While all around us is full of enthusiastic people lauching themselves into a full-throttle Merdeka celebration and infecting [or trying to infect] others around them to feel in the same way, I almost get carried away with this blunt endeavour and still is.
My search for the meaning of this 50 years of independence began as I made a stop in front of the Petronas Gallery in KLCC somewhat two weeks back. There was an exhibition of the earliest national ‘prides’ during the first decade of independence. There was the Merdeka Stadium, UM, Subang Airport etc. Everything was built with concern to the people - how people would and could benefit from that. Tunku was so concerned of the people of Malaya and he wanted the people to enjoy from all the infrastructures that been built. And the cost at that time was still considered low even with respect to our status quo [taking inflation rate as 3% per year]. Everything was so simple and so…. let me put it this way, life was good then. We come together as one and we live [though not ultra-modern and hyper-rich] very prosperously. That’s what merdeka should be about - we live happily, prosperously and harmoniously. Compare this to situation now, everything and everyone is so individualistic. We dont feel the sense of unity and we dont feel like we are related to another Malaysian as we live only to survive ourselves and too busy minding our own bussiness to care about others.
My Political Science lecturer said something that rang my [dusty] bell. She mentioned on how secured we feel when we are blessed with so many good things and abundant of wealth until we forgot how it feels to be standing in the same land half a century ago. We forgot how hard we have to strive for something, how unselfish we were and how long it took just to bond these races in our country. Yet, here we are, as if knowing what we are celebrating but left as individuals with nothing gained after waited patiently for the clock struck 12.
What is Merdeka? And what does this Golden Jubilee implies? With more corruption cases climbing up the index, rich-poor gap are becoming super wider, more people lagging in education, youngsters prefer to do ‘volunteer’ loitering around the mall wearing punk or skinhead attires - do we still dare to shout out that we have accomplished 50 years of Merdeka? If the situation is as good as back then, I dare to go all out for this Merdeka but sadly the situation is not what it seemed.
Nevertheless, Im still a proud Malaysian. Always proud of country. Always will be one.
Happy 50th Birthday, Malaysia
