RIFLE RANGE BOY

Jatt vs IELTS (Punjabi; 2018) Director: Devi Dutt It is a problem in most developing countries. The generation around the country's independence bent over backwards to provide for the family. They felt contented to be self-sufficient and to ensure their offspring were not deprived of the things they missed. With the advent of widespread dissemination of information and systemic glorification of modern living, the youngsters just turned out pompous and sluggards. This is a universal problem experienced by societies in upcoming post-independent Asian nations. The younger generation cannot wait to buzz off from their birth country. They feel they can only find their true potential away from the toxic environments enveloping their nations. The West, it seems, gave them the validation and liberation they needed.  Modern education provides equal opportunities for all. The end result of this is women performing way better in all academic indices.  About twenty years ago, it seems the...

Yennanga Sire Ungga Sattam (என்னங்க சார் உங்க சட்டம், Tamil; 2021) Director: Prabhu Jeyaraman Suppose the idea of affirmative action is to uplift a particular community group and give an equal fighting chance to the oppressed to get their place in the sun. In that case, it should only be handed to one generation. After being given the levy, their offspring should not be expecting the same. Everybody only gets one chance. They are expected to pull themselves up by their boot-straps with the chance given to them. That is it. Freebies are not infinite.  This film is one of the many new genre movies which highlights the plight of fringe people. The filmmakers named this movie a duplex as the real story with message starts with the movie's second part. The first part is essentially a draggy commercial that does not contribute much to the rest of the story. In a complicated way, it boils down to two scenarios. The first instance involves an interview for a government post. The viewe...

A recent interview that was caught on radio about a Kelantanese boy who studied in a Chinese type school, stayed above his father's mechanic shop studying all the way to Cambridge, becoming a renowned surgeon in the London only to discover that he was wasting his time in England sipping tea lazily on an autumn afternoon at the prime of his life. That prompted him to pack his bags and family back to the country where he remembered his childhood was. Maybe he thought that he was not getting any younger whilst his contemporary were minting money away in private practice in Malaysia and enjoying its perks. Pray listen and decide.... All the 21 years of training in the UK has surely improved his communication skills and he is not too economical with his words like most Asians are. And as you can see he wears many hats!

Malaysian Insider May 19, 2011 MAY 19 — I am a Malay working overseas. I find working in Malaysia unattractive due to the following reasons. I don’t want to belabour the points, so I list them down in point form: Chinese chauvinism/racism • Most private organisations including TMI are dominated by the Chinese and/or their political agenda. • Chinese people have a tendency to assign negative stereotypes on other races (especially the Bumiputera races). • They exhibit cliquish, insular, secretive and calculating behaviour. • Chinese people favour fair-skinned people even though fair skin is disadvantageous in Malaysia’s sunny climate. • They admire China’s achievements, despite China’s oppressive regime. • Malaysian Chinese use the Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien etc.) to isolate their discussion from others while in their presence. • The Chinese are not honest about failures of ethnic Chinese leaderships in Philippines and Thailand. • Tokenism is rife in Ch...

Malaysian Insider May 18, 2011 MAY 18 — I’ve left Malaysia for about nine years now, and lived and worked in several countries such as Singapore, China and, now, Hong Kong. The past and recent news reports on brain drain have pretty much summarised the reasons for leaving Malaysia except they were not accepted by our leaders. I’ll just echo some of the findings by relating my personal experience. Social injustice Unable to get into local universities even with good academic results. Mine was a working-class family and my dad had to work extremely hard to save (barely) enough money to put me through a private college (whose quality could be questioned). It was a twinning program with an American university. A large portion of our class (100 per cent non-Bumiputera) didn’t end up going to the America for their final year to “twin” with the university because of financial difficulties. Those who did, like me, mostly have remained overseas. Low income I did return to work in Kual...

Aliran  11 May 2011 Unless the government and the private sector tackle the real issues, the brain drain will continue to haunt Malaysia, says Ronald Benjamin. The ongoing brain drain has become a topic of intense debate since a World Bank official said that Malaysia would have had five times foreign direct investment if not for its pro-bumi policy. This comes at a time where there are about a million skilled Malaysian workers overseas who have no intention of coming back to the country. Perkasa has claimed that even the Malays are leaving Malaysia due to the discrimination in the private sector, but fell short of providing detailed arguments on what it means by private sector discrimination. All these debates only deal with positions that interest a particular political position without any serious attempt to resolve the issues through objective criteria that require politicians to accept truths about the real situation. Politicians need to have the courage to take the natio...

Studying for a better future overseas? So as usual, at this time of the year, the local newspapers will be plastered with news of how great the public examinations results were. They will give a breakdown of how the overall percentage of the result had improved. It is beginning to sound like a re-run of an old soap opera or broken gramophone record - just like me, too! There would soon pictures of handicapped students passing with flying colours and children of hawkers and seamstresses obtaining good results. A few days after that the announcement would be out on the closing date of applications for scholarship and entrance to universities. Like clock work, a few days after the results of acceptance of the above, flashed again on the newspapers, would be disgruntled parents who will be complaining about how his kids with such exemplary results failed to secure a place and how excellent his extra curricular results were. Then Michael Chong (the Public Complaints bureau of Malaysian...

Every now and then our local dailies will sing praises of world standard achievements of supposedly 'Malaysians' where the only Malaysian thing about them would be their or their parent(s) place of birth. Malaysia probably had nothing to do with their grooming or nurturing! Or there may be a remote thread of a connection to her mother who was married once to a Malaysian, like in the case of the out-of-closet Penny Wong, the first Asian Finance Minister of Australia. Then there is the story of Sufiah Yusof, the Oxford Maths child prodigy turned social escort (₤130 pounds/hour) whose mother was Malaysian.The latest to join this list of celebrities is the Ipoh-born Tan Zhang Shan. From the era of his predecessors in the late 70s, Singapore has been engaging in a devious plan to woo bright Malaysian across the causeway by dangling carrots in the form of ASEAN scholarship and tertiary education scholarships. Many of my classmates in Penang Free School are and have been contributi...