Just a minute, Boss!

Mother and daughter, keeping faith despite the fallow. Pix: Jakarta Post

Elder Brother asks, "So what's going on in KL?"

He has a shelf above where we sit, outside the house, to rap. And today on it was the day's NST Edition.

I told him that all Malaysians have made a fool of themselves out of this, Saiful thing. That we do see this and we'll have to see how it plays out.

He thinks Saiful is just a misguided Youth and he began to relate a story about a friend's son who joined some commune and still depended on parents though he might have two wives.

Saiful is an interesting case because he is a Youth Leader, and youths of all the Pondok Gading or Pusing as some might attest to. So why was this leader of Youth getting all the Ministers attention, I asked. I couldn't get a good answer. To even up things, we might think that he is a muddled up kid with lousy grades, bad finances and a flair for the ridiculous, jazzy, catchy short cut to some whatever. Even for the attention and love of the girl he's supposedly engaged to. But through it all, he was getting recognition---and many Malaysian youths might believe this so, and this the way to go. But not all surely. We hope it's not the majority.

So I asked how come in Indonesia with no Government help, people get together and make sense of the life they had, disregarding the Sunni's and the Shias there. Even though last week, someone claimed to be a prophet there. Of course there, they have the law of large numbers, people wise. They just don't have one physical land mass.

I asked him why was it, being beneficiaries of the imperialist colonialist education system, in school, that we had read Orwell, Huxley, Dickens and when we left and got on with our lives, it seemed to have been erased from our memory? Apparently, he said, nobody bothered. Well, the sinister thing was that some people bothered and because they did, we forgot!

I reminded him that he was more in macro economic planning than I was, and asked why having ploughed money and resources, we didn't have people in management standing up to Mahathir, holding him back and pausing to digest implications of the issues to do with his policies? He said, "Mahathir was an arrogant jerk!"

So what socio-human capital does Abdullah Badawi mean every time he blahed blahed his way daily?

In this fervent mood for change, that Anwar Ibrahim is spearheading, do we need to stand with and up to him or his top people when needed and say, "Just a minute, Boss!"?