BM vs English – Tongue in Cheek

One of my favourite bloggers is Syed Akhbar because he has such fresh ideas about what is happening in Malaysia culturally and politically. Though I must admit he is an unapologetic BN (National Front) fan, yet he still hentam ( hammers) them when he feels they are not in the right path. He discusses a lot on government policies and religion in perceptively secular mode. His support for and promotion of PPSMI (the teaching of Maths and Science in English) is legendary. He always pokes fun at the government handling on the use of English in schools and while reading on the topic, I came across this piece from one of his readers; (taken verbatim), I would like to share this brilliant “tongue in cheek” comments with my blog readers.

“quote”

Anonymous said…

See what happened to those who had English ? After frolicking on the world wide web, they now had the audacity to demand for a clean, non-corrupt government, to demand for intelligent, capable MPs and Ministers, demand for human rights and equal rights, demand for removal of apartheid, demand for abolishment of discriminatory treatment, demand for seditious racist leaders to be jailed….macam macam lagi more and more demands every other week !

Thank god at least 70% of our citizens are still on the bahasa mode, unable to speak or understand the English word….they got all their news from TV 1,2,3 and Utusan Meloya and the likes. These are the ‘law abiding’ citizens, who swallowed every word churned out by our great leaders and they feel safe and secure after reading and listening to these right sources which assured them that our country is world champions in so many areas and our future so bright and we will achieved developed status in 8 years’ time. 

How not to be assured…. see, we have the world’s tallest building here ( at one time ) and we have so many modern buildings and other world leaders praised our Putrajaya, green with envy even and we even sent our very own astronaut to the moon, oops, to the outer space, or somewhere in outer space to test our roti canai or something like that.

Learning English might be the fastest route to catch up with the world but at what price ? Imagine putting all sorts of ideas into our obedient citizens and becoming biadap like some of these English educated smart alecks, god forbids.

Hidup bahasa melayu !

Sunday, December 16, 2012 8:16:00 AM

“Unquote”

The sarcasm is deep and cutting. While I cannot stop smiling reading this piece, I also feel sad at the reality that is facing our country today. There is a whole wide world of knowledge out there on the internet at your fingertip and yet many of our students and young people are not able to take advantage of and benefit from it due to their inability to understand the language let alone speak it.

The art of investing, financial know-how and wealth creation materials are mostly in English and sadly those not conversant in the language miss out a lot on the very thing which could help them to be financially savvied and improve their quality of life.

Most internet materials in BM (Malay) about investing discuss what happened and in contrast, those in English concentrate on how and why it happened and lessons learnt.

Poor knowledge,less right questions

And of course, people who don’t read at all will never know anything that has happened!

Bible in any language is okay except…

The impounding of imported Bible from Indonesia written in Bahasa Melayu-BM (Malay) by Malaysian custom is deplorable. After a hue and cry from the Christian community, the Bibles are finally released on condition that each copy should bear a variety of stamps. This stamping business is seen as a defacement of the Holy Book.

The contention of some people is that the Bible can be in any language but not BM in Malaysia. One rather influential blogger chose to fan this abnormal distaste about BM-Bible that many of his visitors vented their anger and even suggested that the Bible could be written in Kadazan, an ethnic group in East Malaysia, who are mainly Christians. I found the suggestion childish. I posted a comment on the blog about being fair and reasonable but as expected my well-meaning comment on religious tolerance was not published!

For more than 20 years now Malaysia has been promoting BM as the main language. All the medium of instruction in secondary schools are in BM since 1983. Many ethnic groups know the language very well. I think some Kadazan families communicate more in BM than their own language. Yet when the Non-Muslim want to practice their faith in BM, they are unceremoniously told that they can not. This is not logical at all.

I hope the government would take a firm step to protect the rights of all citizens in line with the country’s constitution on the freedom to worship. We cannot let paranoid individuals impose unreasonable demands on the use of other people’s holy texts, creating chasms in our society.

There appears to be no sense of empathy for people who profess a different faith. At times I wish that these intolerant people get reincarnated as those whom they victimise when they were alive! I am not a Buddhist by the way.

If our faith is strong we should not worry about our people converting to another religion by just reading their Holy book! Should we feel thus, we need to work harder to internalise our belief. It is the substance rather than the form which matters.

Religious paranoia thrives on insecurity.