There must be something wrong with our top down approach in teaching History to our young ones. And what do you expect from the politicians who always keep changing the origin and the course of history as they fancy to befit their bedevilled agenda?
The real history of a civilisation and a nation should be rightly learnt from a ground-up manner. The real story lies hidden amongst the many untold narrations of the little people, the fabric who make the nation, not the generals and warlords who look at events of the day through their rose tinted glasses who would want themselves to be portrayed in Annals of times as heroes.
Many such stories of the ordinary people remain untold in this country. Their viewpoints had never been seen as sexy or newsworthy. After all, they are just economic migrants in pursuit of survival from a land already in ruins. What do they know? They are sometimes viewed by the earlier dwellers as just snatchers of the country's wealth to send it back to their land of origin. They never had it good in any way. If the push factor from their Motherland was not bad enough, the situation in Malaya was no bed of roses either. If there they suffered from deprivations and diseases arising thereof, here they had to battle with the excesses, the torrential monsoon rain, the scorching heat and its illnesses as well - malaria and filariasis. And the war that rocked the whole world. If that was not enough, the scourge of the communist and political interplay of the superpowers were to follow.
Prof VGK Dass, putting aside his academic hat to indulge in a biography-novel writing, did his part by paying homage to this deceased mother. He relives his mother 's escapades through the turbulent years of old pre-WW2 Malaya all through to her demise. He inked her struggles of bringing up her seven children as a young widow in a foreign country with her strong determination as her weapon, her trust in God as her shield and her never-say-die attitude as her ammunition to bring her family to steady ground. Along the way, she contributed her share to nation building. The biography tells her interactions with her new comrades of various ethnicities and her adjustments to the new country.
The book also narrates of this matriarchal's travels, her friends, her relatives and her joy with her kids and grandchildren.
"Gowri' is a tribute by the eldest son to his mother who was widowed at 42 and he lost his father at 17, who co-parented his six other siblings.
To order http://www.gowribiography.com/buy/
P.S. Another struggle yet to be told (http://asokan63.blogspot.my/2014/01/eulogy.html)
