PPSMI: Sisi bejat budaya

A friend, an ex-colleague in a government department where we used to slog for almost a quarter of a century honestly confessed, “I find it very tiring to complete even a page of Malay.” Another has another interesting observation, “You just cannot allow something that comes in naturally, the death of a language for instance. You look around you, how many of us, the second generation of migrants from the various Indonesian islands keep their mother tongue? So what is the problem? Even in Indonesia today, people are so enthusiastic about mastering English. I feel the next era would be that of English.” Both of them are Malays, one an ex-RMC, the other an-ex MCKK.

A man accidentally bumped into a woman in the street. Instantaneously their eyes glued, a sudden burst of that itchy-bitchy fatal attraction led them to the inevitable. The next filmic moment, you see them entangled, “siput-babi” in bed.

Not long after I left school, in the late 70s I had an encounter with my senior who went to Hobart for his mechanical engineering degree. There was something interesting about that conversation. Of course we jumped from one topic to another. I remember this one vividly until today, “I told my sister there is nothing wrong if you want to sleep with a man. But be sure, not to be pregnant”

My son, my third child who has completed his UNITEN days has this to tell his mother, “Mama tau budak-budak pompuan sekarang ramai yang berlumba-lumba nak tunjuk sapa yang paling ramai dapat tidur dengan jantan? Depa bangga, depa cukup bangga ma!”

May be my observation is just distorted, too hopelessly skewed. May be, it is. I am part of history, the past. However looking at the pages of Edward Said, ‘Budaya dan Imperialisme’ (Edward Said, ITNM, 2008), the original was written in 1993 under the title of Culture and Imperialism; I do not think we are as independent as we would like to think we are.

We definitely love our ex-conquerors. We simply love them, at least culturally. And as a nation, deep inside us we just hate why we were not born putih?

Inilah sisi bejat PPSMI yang jarang dibicarakan pemimpin besar kita. Pemimpin yang mahu kita segera maju, macam Barat.