Episode 1 (Pilot)
The bell bottoms of the 70s was getting out of fashion in the 80s. The hairs still remained fluffy and thick. People rarely went to barbers, they just trimmed the hair around the ear or just pulled it back! The bells at the bottom of pants got slimmer, maybe not as thin as the drain pipe.
After SPM (the O levels), I spent a lot time at Klang when my uncle moved in to his brand new bungalow in a brand new house estate which is now in a prime area in thick of activities. During this time, I had the privilege of establishing male bonding with a few guys who were there too at time or another - including G, P and LBM.
After finally uprooting ourselves from RRF to plant ourselves in BG, I hardly spent any time (a year and a half) before it was time to be off to varsity. Euphoria was the order of the week in the Sham family at the tail end of May 1983. Letters manifested from NUS and USM offering engineering and medicine respectively. After much deliberation, I decided (with the guidance of the most learned person in the family, Mama) to pursue medical studies in Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang.
After spending 7 years in Penang Free School (PFS), the premier school in the country with a proud tradition to match it, the first impression upon entry to medical school of USM was one of disbelief and grief. Grief, for not opting to Singapore, the shining metropolitan city with its prestigious and glamorous institute of a higher learning to match. Disbelief? Scoring relatively good results in STPM (Malaysian equivalent of A levels), products of schools with a grandeur history of records, my batch mates could not believe that we were sharing a medical school (in our book were the pinnacle of achievement of any school boy) with some of the most unforgettable characters that one can encounter (maybe on Harold Lloyd's slapstick comedy sketch).
Landing in PFS from Hutchings was a culture shock in a positive way, where brilliant child prodigies were roaming about the place with intelligence oozing from their every orifice. In USM medical school (PPSP), we were plastered with ghostly apparitions which were quite aliens to us even though we were all living and grew in the same country and studied the same syllabi. Never before in our lives, have we had ever seen such a mammoth congregations of real apparitions in penguin-like suit draped over torsos, faces and heads in unimaginative dull dark unattractive hues and lifeless designs, walking looking at the ground as if they were looking for spare change. (Reminds me of Pink Floyd's 'Another Brick on the Wall' music video where the school children were walking aimlessly and clueless in a robotic manner.)
A tinge of uncertainty or maybe regret was there at the back of the mind if I had indeed made the correct decision of choosing USM instead of the scintillating metropolitan lights of the state city of Singapore and its glamorous and prestigious institute of higher learning to match, NUS.
I could not stomach the fact that some of my brilliant school-mates were denied entry to local varsities and had to uproot themselves off to foreign lands which were receiving them with open arms, Singapore in particular. And here, we were stuck with walking zombies. To be fair, there were some intelligent chaps amongst us but the partition of Bumiputras and nons were as apparent as the Partition of North and South Korea along the 38th parallel!
There were students who were even from places that I never knew existed in Malaysia, like Kota Sarang Semut! (in Kedah, later I found out). Some were alien to the lingua franca of the world- English and knew only a smatter of it, Yes, sir. Yes sir. Three bags full!
There was a group of withdrawn students in my faculty who found solace amongst the same kind who had the delusion that we were traveling in a desert storm. They seem well versed in Arabic language as if we were living at the time of the Islamic Renaissance. Their every sentence spoken in public would be prefixed with full regatta of Islamic greetings (Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim.Assalamulaikum warahmatullahir wabarakatuh ...kesyukuran ke hadrat Allah Subhanahu Wata’ala atas limpah kurniaNya...) and they would put the rest of us, the infidels, in our places by a simple 'have a nice day' (salam sejahtera).
to be continued...................
The bell bottoms of the 70s was getting out of fashion in the 80s. The hairs still remained fluffy and thick. People rarely went to barbers, they just trimmed the hair around the ear or just pulled it back! The bells at the bottom of pants got slimmer, maybe not as thin as the drain pipe.
After SPM (the O levels), I spent a lot time at Klang when my uncle moved in to his brand new bungalow in a brand new house estate which is now in a prime area in thick of activities. During this time, I had the privilege of establishing male bonding with a few guys who were there too at time or another - including G, P and LBM.
After finally uprooting ourselves from RRF to plant ourselves in BG, I hardly spent any time (a year and a half) before it was time to be off to varsity. Euphoria was the order of the week in the Sham family at the tail end of May 1983. Letters manifested from NUS and USM offering engineering and medicine respectively. After much deliberation, I decided (with the guidance of the most learned person in the family, Mama) to pursue medical studies in Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang.
After spending 7 years in Penang Free School (PFS), the premier school in the country with a proud tradition to match it, the first impression upon entry to medical school of USM was one of disbelief and grief. Grief, for not opting to Singapore, the shining metropolitan city with its prestigious and glamorous institute of a higher learning to match. Disbelief? Scoring relatively good results in STPM (Malaysian equivalent of A levels), products of schools with a grandeur history of records, my batch mates could not believe that we were sharing a medical school (in our book were the pinnacle of achievement of any school boy) with some of the most unforgettable characters that one can encounter (maybe on Harold Lloyd's slapstick comedy sketch).
Landing in PFS from Hutchings was a culture shock in a positive way, where brilliant child prodigies were roaming about the place with intelligence oozing from their every orifice. In USM medical school (PPSP), we were plastered with ghostly apparitions which were quite aliens to us even though we were all living and grew in the same country and studied the same syllabi. Never before in our lives, have we had ever seen such a mammoth congregations of real apparitions in penguin-like suit draped over torsos, faces and heads in unimaginative dull dark unattractive hues and lifeless designs, walking looking at the ground as if they were looking for spare change. (Reminds me of Pink Floyd's 'Another Brick on the Wall' music video where the school children were walking aimlessly and clueless in a robotic manner.)
A tinge of uncertainty or maybe regret was there at the back of the mind if I had indeed made the correct decision of choosing USM instead of the scintillating metropolitan lights of the state city of Singapore and its glamorous and prestigious institute of higher learning to match, NUS.
I could not stomach the fact that some of my brilliant school-mates were denied entry to local varsities and had to uproot themselves off to foreign lands which were receiving them with open arms, Singapore in particular. And here, we were stuck with walking zombies. To be fair, there were some intelligent chaps amongst us but the partition of Bumiputras and nons were as apparent as the Partition of North and South Korea along the 38th parallel!
There were students who were even from places that I never knew existed in Malaysia, like Kota Sarang Semut! (in Kedah, later I found out). Some were alien to the lingua franca of the world- English and knew only a smatter of it, Yes, sir. Yes sir. Three bags full!
There was a group of withdrawn students in my faculty who found solace amongst the same kind who had the delusion that we were traveling in a desert storm. They seem well versed in Arabic language as if we were living at the time of the Islamic Renaissance. Their every sentence spoken in public would be prefixed with full regatta of Islamic greetings (Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim.Assalamulaikum warahmatullahir wabarakatuh ...kesyukuran ke hadrat Allah Subhanahu Wata’ala atas limpah kurniaNya...) and they would put the rest of us, the infidels, in our places by a simple 'have a nice day' (salam sejahtera).to be continued...................
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