Comments posted in Malaysia Today before the 2008 general elections on 8 March 2008 in which the opposition parties won more than 1/3 the Parliamentary seats and became states government for Kedah, Penang, Perak and Selangor for the 1st time.
Suara rakyat, suara keramat
The Malaysian Indians suffered from a combination of factors.
Culturally they are a people conditioned to accept whatever life has to offer. They call that fate. Which is why their Hindu caste system lasted for a few thousand years and still going.
The Hindu caste system also conditioned them subconsciously to submit blindly to whoever happens to be in position of power. Thus their past faithfulness to Samy Vellu and BN.
In our country, Indians had also been conditioned to submit to the Malaysian caste system where they are further placed below some other people that have 'special positions'.
All these had combined to instill in the least well-to-do segments of Malaysian Indians (which is the majority) an inferiority complex worse than that created by their Hindu caste system.
If Malaysian Indians had failed, it is because our country had failed them and made them feel worse than what their disastrous caste system had done.
If Malaysian Indians had failed, it is because our country had intentionally kept them down by forsaking or letting them forsake their children's education.
It is only through education and, thereof, the opportunity to partake in all the best opportunities the country and the world has to offer (this means equality and meritocracy), that Malaysian Indians can get out of the rut that their own culture and government had created for them.
It should pain all compassionate Malaysians to see those pictures of our Tamil schools operating out of huts and 2-storey shop houses.
It is clear that the Indian community is too poor to start with to have much opportunity to get out of their hole themselves.
For one, they are now lower down in the Malaysian caste system than they had ever been in history, and cannot feed off others by the wave of a straight or crooked knife.
Just as their Hindu caste managed to keep their lowest members perennially subservient by keeping them continuously desperate, with whatever time they have spent on struggling to just survive not to say to figure out who among their leaders (all predators) were lying to them, the Malaysian caste system had done the same and worse with the help of a certain MIC and Samy Vellu.
The Indians may also be spread too thin to be able to run their Tamil schools cost effectively.
And if this country's government cannot or do not wish to uplift the Malaysian Indians who are unlikely to do so on their own, then the good people of the other races should extend a helping hand instead of talking to them condescendingly.
Going to so-called 'national' schools may also not be the solution as is obvious to anyone with some insight, including the discerning Malays who send their children to Chinese schools (even Mahathir talked about it when they were calling for his head).
The Chinese schools, on the other hand, have more critical mass (that is before a certain group of ‘special viles’ chase them out or kill them off with crooked knives), and the right people and value system to do that.
So I suggest that Indian and Chinese educationists consider the option of bringing the Indians into the fold of the Chinese school system/network.
If any group of people is able to do that, it is these 2.
Come on Indians and Chinese Malaysians, you have not much more to lose but all the more to gain by coming together, starting with our children and by imparting to them the knowledge and skills to compete successfully anywhere on earth, whatever dirt-princes notwithstanding.
2 people from 2 of the largest and greatest civilizations in history can surely find the space in our hearts and our schools to keep ourselves and our great cultures (except the Hindu caste system, of course) standing together upright against the odds posed by the vile predators that lord the Malaysian caste system.
xxx
Theva's desperate plea
Malaysia's middle class Indians can be ignored but there is more at stake than just votes
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It is true that more than just votes is at stake but it is not true that Malaysia's Indian middle class can be ignored just because their numbers are small.
If number is all that matters in the advancement of the human race and in national development, then Malaysia should be lording over Singapore by now and Indonesia over Malaysia.
The truth is only a small number of minds really makes a difference in this world.
The rest are mere followers and hitch-hikers. Some are worse than that, as Malaysia show abundantly.
Although only a few really makes a difference, no one can ever foretell who those few will be and where they will come from.
Thus the need to give every single deserving individual the best opportunity they deserve to grow, and not waste resources on the undeserving. That is meritocracy.
The 7% Malaysians who are Indians may be small in number but we should be mindful that among all the races in Malaysia, that race have produced the largest number of Nobel prize winners. (Globally, there have been 6 ethnic Indian winners, 5 Chinese, and 0 Malays)
Some Malaysian races can claim to be princes of some soil or dirt, but none other than the Indian race in Malaysia can claim the honour of being awarded with the most Nobel prize.
It is perhaps timely to remember Chandrasekhar Subramanyam, the physicist from an Indian middle class family whose work was once publicly insinuated by his white mentor in front of a gathering of the Royal Astronomical Society.
None of the established European physicists of that time came to that young man's rescue.
One reason was that white mentor held the title of ‘father of modern astronomy’ and had arrogantly claimed that he was only 1 of 3 men in the world at that time that understood Einstein's theory of relativity. His name was Arthur Eddington.
The Nobel Prize committee was not impressed with Eddington but gave Chandrasekhar a Nobel prize for his work (on what became known as 'Chandrasekhar Limit') that arrogant Eddington scoffed at.
Chandrasekhar's uncle C.V. Raman was also a Nobel prize winner for his work on the Raman Effect (Physics).
Now, what race, not to say middle class family, can claim the honour of having 2 Nobel prize winners in 2 generations?
So Malaysian Indians,
Some people in Malaysia may look down on you or scoff at you but they will never be able to get anywhere near the achievements of your race.
Your people's achievements is Nature's way of showing you promise. And hope.
So hold your heads up high. Only fools ignore you to their own loss and detriment.
xxx
Malaysian Indian Muslims want to be called Malays
Kuala Lumpur, Mar 3 2008: Members of the Malaysian Indian Muslim Youth Movement (Gepima) want to be known as Malays and not Indians.
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In the 19th century the western countries led by the British forced the Chinese to allow the sale of opium and made a lot of gold/money selling opium derived from India and Afghanistan (the British called that dominion 'the Jewel of the Crown').
At the same time their religious groups offered food and money (subsidised by that opium money, mainly) to any Chinese willing to convert to Christianity.
To the more humane in the west, the view was Christianity would humanise and civilise the Chinese.
Others like a British poet, Rudyard Kipling, considered the Asiatics and Africans (regions the west were fighting to colonise then) 'A Whitemen's Burden'.
And Kipling's poem of that name called upon the Americans to join the British in colonising these regions filled with 'half-devil and half-child'.
That poem was written when the Americans had whacked and taken possession of all Spanish dominions in the Americas and Pacific, and was occupying the Philippines.
Faced with the generosity of money derived the opium sale (so it was really money from the Chinese themselves) and the ineptitude of their own government, many of the poorest and desperate Chinese then took up the conversion offer to survive.
The other Chinese called the conversions 'shi jiao' or literally 'eating religion'.
The Indians of Gepima may also be just wanting to 'eat race'.
But are the people they want to join that generous, or would they just treat them as half-devil and half-child?
xxx
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