APRIL 3 — Malaysia, as it is today, would be difficult to explain to my countrymen a hundred years from now.
Fortunately, by then it won’t be a headache — for me. I plan a cremation, a speck in a sea I’ve never seen. Hopefully, a bit on an unmentioned hill in Hulu Langat.
When I read social commentaries these days, without giving too much credence to those who hide behind keyboards, I cannot deny the bile leaves a bitter taste. Perhaps they are children of men I went to school with in the 1970s.
It is a headache today and a monumental challenge to explain inside a column.
In this adolescent country, what is said is tied to who is saying it. By who, it means the person’s demography, not the person’s character.
They read Prabakaran Ganesan, and many are convinced where I stand on everything without having seen me sit.
An inferno attempted to rise up to the heavens two days ago in Putra Heights. Twenty agencies are apparently investigating with answers to follow. Yet it is already infused with ethnic rhetoric, online.
Somehow, among threads about chronology of events, oversight, documentation, property development, gas pipeline technology, opaque processes inside local councils, compensation, insurance and emergency responses the spectre of race consumes us like fire.
Somehow, always.
To desist from the hackneyed, I prefer to speak briefly about anger and proximity, they dominate the social media exchanges.
You won’t like me when I’m angry
Anger is, despite its exhausting nature, admired in Malaysia. Almost as if to be angry is a commendable trait. It is not.
Young children throw tantrums like how geriatrics refuse pills. Anger is a constant for the smart and stupid. How that is an achievement, baffles.
This is not to rule out anger as an emotion. Just setting its place.
Necessary when the directly and immediately affected suspect avoidable neglect. Like what the victims of the tragedy experience holed up in a shelter without a car to drive to their destroyed homes.
Then there are those who feel anger on behalf. Someone who shares their identity, race or religion, suffers and these self-declared surrogates are enraged.
They cannot stop themselves. Worse, they associate it with other incidents with the most tenuous links, insisting race-related inconsistencies.
There are no sides in anger. Those who foment it want temperatures to rise enough that people are forced to their identity politics corners. To split them up. And in this climate that is a low bar to climb.
Those who are not affected but inconsolable on behalf of others are a different breed.
In traditional Indian communities, usually economically disadvantaged, there are professional funeral attendees.
They probably knew the deceased briefly or maybe not at all, but they will cry their lungs out.
Inducing further screams and rants from others too because it turns into a contest. Grief competition.
The anger online reminds me of them. With better diction but the exact same fixation. To cause a commotion with the belief they are helping.
With social evolution, maybe in a hundred years, they would have been programmed out of our society.
Don’t live too close to me now
Then there is proximity.
In a divisive time, the agitators recount horror tales of having to live with other folks. The proximity hurts them.
They cook, pray, smell and taunt.
On the same token, I am equally miffed when people play-up multicultural communes and highlight open houses as the epitome of harmony.
Living together is a challenge. The degree of difficulty increases with those who do not look similar and whose rituals are antithetical to yours.
But strip it down further, living with anyone not yourself is a daunting prospect. Just look at the divorce rates.
As societies develop, the individual dominates.
It is not neighbours we struggle with, verily the people inside the same unit barely survive each other.
My friend can snore through any apartment wall. My vegan friend lives with his meat-loving wife. Parents and children can talk incessantly about the impossible nature of their family members.
But they survive.
Outside the unit, what about the irritant neighbour? Justified or not, irritation is irritation.
The better question, the one which leads to a conclusion, do brilliant neighbours without faults exist?
The street I grew up in was almost monoethnic but it did not mean we hugged each other daily. Over time, if one cares to observe, compatibility is not race-based.
Societies are efforts to build and the responsibility of its constituents. Whether a nation or an apartment block.
Pipe it down
Get carried away with the narratives of the angry upset with strange looking people’s smells and end up absolutely nowhere.
Meanwhile, a pipeline blows up and it needs Malaysians to focus on the victims and next policy steps. Not feed anger.
For the majority of the victims were initially treated at the Sri Maha Kaliamman Temple. Over five hundred found temporary shelter at Masjid Putra Heights and Subang Jaya City Council’s Dewan Camelia.
No more has to be written about it other than that those affected were cared for.
Neither temple, mosque nor council hall are expected to have caused the pipeline explosion.
International press picked it up for obvious reasons. The fires have died out and the international press moved on to other exciting tales worldwide for obvious reasons.
It’s Malaysians who live here who must deal with it.
While it seems, the love is not quite shared, the problems are shared by us all. To overcome or to suffer.
Maybe, those are the steps to take to be the example future Malaysians can be proud of. To ignore the anger and work on the solutions.
Or just give up, and officially give out anger awards at national, state, district and apartment floor level.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
