A Rallying Cry!

The War Against Indians(2025)

150 Years of Betrayal, Suppression and Injustice in Malaya & Malaysia.

Author: Suthan Mookaiah

At the outset, the author does not claim the book as a literary work. He professes to merely inking his lived experiences. The sales of his books are a legitimate revenue source for him, as he funds upliftment programmes in Tamil Schools through his movement, Maatram.

Sollayah grew up in Taman West Country, a former estate land in Kajang. He saw the estates in Malaysia flattened in the heady days of Mahathirism. In the rapaciousness to make Malaysia a developed nation by 2020 and produce mega-millionaires of a certain denomination, the country was in heat. There was a land rush. Apparently, nobody, including the Indian leaders who were meant to represent them, had the inkling to think of the millions of Indians who had at least two to generations of a family whose world only revolved around the rubber estates and their surroundings.

Nobody thought of having the ex-estate workers vocational training or structured living programmes. Most economic developmental ideas initiated by its leader went into disarray. The Tamil schools were left unfunded with their structures in deplorable states. Community leaders of other groups were smart enough to care for the down line whilst the Indians were busy fattening their own coffers and running down each other.

The author's father had the wisdom to send his son to be educated in a national school (as compared to a Tamil school, as most nostalgic ex-estate dwellers would) despite the financial restraints. The author's father was odd-jobbing as a grasscutter. Suthan's studies enabled him to secure him a comfortable remuneration overseas. He returned to his homeland around the turn of the last decade and decided to pay back to the society he grew up in.

Through his movement, he tries to expose the decades of systemic marginalisation of the community after the collapse of the plantation economy. He tries to give dignity to Tamil Schools and stop the indiscriminate destruction of Hindu temples. The criminalisation of Indian youth is worrisome.

The author suggests the community to use the power of social to learn and disseminate useful information to hurl up the community to sturdy grounds.

He sells his book through the TikTok shop.

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It was a lovely day!

At 'starting point'

Have you heard the latest news around town? The National Heart Institute (Institut Jantung Negara, IJN) is offering free stress tests. Unlike other medical procedures, this one is not conducted in a hospital; it is carried out on the streets. Yes, IJN organised its annual premier cycling event, IJN Ride. All you need to do is sign up, choose your category, and ride. If you have anything suggestive of a heart condition, IJN will take it from there.

So, there it was. IJN Ride For Your Heart on 19th January 2025. The 115 km ride was scheduled to start at 7am. So there we were, waiting at the starting line in Anyara Hills, Semenyih, a new housing development. And waiting. The announcer had run out of announcements to make in his not-so-proficient English. The VIP was still not there to flag the participants. Despite being the State's Chief Minister with police outriders and controlled traffic for him to pass through, he thought it fashionable to arrive late. I guess he wanted to stamp his authority. When he finally arrived, ten minutes late, the participants gave him a befitting welcome. When the announcer, in his highly accented English, asked the participants to warmly welcome the VIP, they responded with pin-drop silence accentuated by the screaming of cicadas. 

Just barely 400 metres after flag-off, there was a casualty. Two cyclists had crashed into each other's path. Shaken but not stirred, they were all right. It was a lovely day to ride. For someone from an area with a temperate climate, their idea of a beautiful day is the sight of the sun over the horizon and sunlight shining through their hair. Not in Malaysia, it is not. The sun showed its full glory by 10 am, and from then on, the temperature reached scorching late 20 degrees C. The idea of engaging in strenuous sporting activities at high noon is indeed a duel mostly avoided by Malaysians. But then, the world needs lunatics to set standards on sanity.

Miraculously, the sun shied away through the ride, all 115 km of it. Either it was one of those gloomy days, or the shamans employed by the organisers must have done a good job. Yes, it is an open secret (or maybe an urban legend) that Malaysian sports bodies have shamans (bomoh) on their payroll to control the weather during important sports events. In the 1970s, when Malaysia was flying high as a football nation, it was discovered that we performed exceptionally well when the pitch was wet. This was attributed to the pathetic training pitches and the players' experience learning to play soccer in their youthful years in paddy fields. So, the bomohs were summoned to perform their 'rain dance' to invite the heavens to pour. That resulted in significant victories for Malaysia in the Merdeka Tournament. Seeing our country bag double-digit goals against minion teams was a common sight.

The ride covered a route commonly used by cyclists around the Klang Valley. Cruising along the flat terrain of Ulu Semenyih, we were guided to the sleepy town of Broga, which in its days had seen much resistance given to British colonial masters. The ride paved us to Lenggeng, another town forgotten in the annals of time. The national highway and the appetite for the general public to get from point to point B in a jiffy essentially sealed the growth of this town. Still, life goes on. Not to be confused with another town in the State of Perak, which still garners attention from the users of the East-West Highway to Kota Bharu. Curious minds flock here to view the complete skeletal remains of the oldest man in South East Man, the Perak Man, at Lenggong Archeological Museum.

At Lenggeng, we took a turn to climb over the Two Sisters, as they may be fondly referred to. It is a bi-peaked formation that is part of the Titiwangsa range. The sisters were quite unforgiving, starting with a 10% climb. It covered about a 5 km distance followed by a free-wheeling decline, only to tackle another 5 km climb heading towards Kuala Klawang, the driest town on the Peninsula, in the district of Jelebu. Another free-wheeling afterwards. 

Kuala Klawang @ Jelebu

By then, we had covered about half of the total distance. After a short banana and bun break, we were good to go.

The next half of the journey included the much-dreaded Kangkoi-Peres climb to Hulu Langat. In essence, it covered a 13 km unforgiving trail, with the road mostly going uphill, punctuated by a couple of deceiving short breathers. The undulating roads created the illusion that the climbs were ending, only to reveal another ascent. It started at the 75 km mark. We expected it to be blazing hot by then. Surprisingly, it was a tolerable 27°C thereabouts, with no sun 'breathing' down our necks. Still, it was no pleasure cruise!

The 'we' I have been mentioning throughout the event consists of me, myself, and my inner demons. I had to train for the race on my own after a fellow partner-in-crime withdrew due to family commitments. It was a test of self-motivation and discipline whilst juggling work commitments and the cranky weather recently. 

The inner demons were mostly curtailed as the external environment was kind. 

These long, monotonous rides make me think. Besides giving me ideas on what to write in the next blog, they also humble me. Finding myself in the middle of mighty structures of Nature that have been around forever reminds me of the fragility of this existence. One minute we are here, and the next you are late (pun intended).

Just like life, we start the race with much pomp and glitz. Along the way, the cyclists break into pelotons akin to all the relatives who keep you company throughout life's path. Deep inside, you still have to manage the day-to-day, just as a cyclist must listen to his body, plan his caloric intake and hydration, avoid potholes, and deal with lunatics behind wheels—motorised and otherwise—who are hell-bent on causing trouble for cyclists just for kicks and the occasional change of gears in anticipation of a climb. Some things work mechanically, like pedalling, while others require vigilance. In other words, you are the controller of your destiny in life, cycling-wise and philosophically. 

Once Genting Peres was conquered, it was a home run, really. Sliding down a 10-km decline from the 85 km mark, the subsequent section consisted of rolling hills. It was back to the starting point, completing a loop of 115 km, climbing over 1,420 m in 5h 25min. 

Even when I hit the finishing line, I had so much pent-up energy that I thought I should have pushed myself more. But then, it is better to finish strong than to drag my sorry self half-dead. What's more, come tomorrow, I have to return to my daytime job.

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Caste, not race?

Origin (2023)
Director: Ava Duverney

(Based on the book, 'Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents' by Isabel Wilkerson)

It is an interesting way of looking at all the problems affecting the world today. It is blamed on caste segregation. Traditionally, we think of caste as a problem only affecting India. And Indians believe it is a system brought in by colonial masters and divided the nation to ease control. The stifling of one layer of society over the other is not just based on the colour of their skin. It is something beyond. The group at the top end of the food chain would want to maintain the status quo and keep the people beneath them forever squashed.

The writer, Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winner, compared situations in three scenarios. 

She looked at the black situation in America, where blacks are stereotyped as troublemakers, poor, unemployed, unemployable and criminals. The system reinforces this stereotype upon them to a level that even the blacks buy into the trope. The blacks become apologetic about how they are and make amends to be 'liked' by the oppressors, i.e. the white Americans. 

The truth of the matter is that the white men brought them as slaves from Africa. Everything was alright when they were the masters and the blacks their slaves. Things became complicated when emancipation happened. The whites made it a point to retain themselves in the highest perch of the food chain. They suppressed the blacks through the preservation of the white gene pool via marriage laws, housing restrictions and educational opportunities. This continued until they occupied the unsavoury aspects of the country's statistics. Stories of police brutality, George Floyd and Trayvon Martin have become a recurrent theme.

It is not the colour of the skin of the other that matters. Look at post-WWI Germany. The wisdom of the Nazi Party thought the Jews should be made the bogeymen to make their country rise from the ashes of the First World War. Propaganda after propaganda of the Nazis made Jews the scorn of the country. Jews were identified, tagged, marked, quarantined, cursed and finally sent to incinerators, all under the law of the land.

The author then travelled to India to see how caste discrimination affects the Dalit community. Accompanied by a Dalit academician, she is told how the elitist and the ruling class suppress the Dalit community from succeeding in life. The film goes on to show how members of the low rung of society are oppressed and confined to performing menial chores that nobody wants to do. Ambedkar is featured here as the living of someone who went on to obtain a double PhD despite all the odds that worked against him to keep him down. The manner in which his society had reservations about sharing, even drinking water, even as a Government official, is stressed too. A statue of Ambedkar in Delhi is shown to be placed in a cage because the statue is constantly vandalised, suggesting to the viewers that the general public hates revering a Dalit figure even though he helped to draft the Indian Constitution. Is that the hint?

The presentation conveniently failed to inform the high number of high-performing students who could not secure a place in the local universities, all because of caste quota. To continue studying, these students and their parents must fork out high sums of money to get foreign education and possibly foreign employment. India's loss is the rest of the world's gain.

The film tries to simplify everything. The innate desire for one person to dominate over the other is inherent in all of us. It does not depend on race or ethnicity. People will find reasons to suppress others with made-up reasons. This probably goes well with critical race theorists who insist that racism is inherent in the legal institution to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.

Wilkerson looks at black suppression not as a race issue but as a caste suppression. A group of people, in the USA's case, it is the Hispanics and the Blacks, are put at the bottom of the hierarchical 'caste system' through generations of oppressive laws.

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Sticking to the same narrative?

American Fiction (2023)

Screenplay & Direction: Cord Jefferson

It seems that we have not changed much since our days as cavemen. Imagine living exposed in a world so hostile we would have tried to understand the unusual things around us. We continued compartmentalising the living and non-living things amongst us even when we became hunter-gatherers, farmers or city dwellers. By compartmentalising everyone in boxes, we thought we had our defences up to remind us which one of them was friends and which were potentially harmful. Gone are club-carrying or sabre-rattling days, but these classifications helped somewhat.

The Chinese viewed anyone non-Huns as barbaric. So did the Greeks, Persians and Arabs. During the mercantile era, the dark-skinned were labelled as God-sanctioned slaves. 

In the USA, post-Civil War America assumed that the emancipated slaves were ill-prepared to fit into modern society. They expected them to remain the subservient ones. They were prevented from getting into mainstream business, education and even usage of common public amnesties. In their own stride, the Blacks did prosper. Records showed the presence of significant numbers of black entrepreneurs and millionaires all through the late 19th century. There were pockets of prosperous descendants of slaves. Such a vicinity was Tulsa in Oklahoma. Like the Osage Nation, there were abundant automobile-owning, well-suited professionals there. Tulsa was fondly called ‘The Black Wall Street’ because of the burgeoning business activity there. 

Resentment was building up there. They could not fathom a subjugated community doing well. So when a white shop assistant cried foul when a black man allegedly pulled her hand. There were many versions of what transpired there, from a lover’s quarrel to miscommunication. Before the due legal process could take its course, the mob decided that he should be lynched and the black residents needed to be torched. It resulted in much property damage and about 600 lives lost. 

It is a cognitive dissonance. The majority wants to continually stereotypically paint the marginalised as the downtrodden, irreparable group of people forever trapped in the loop of melancholy, tragedy and hopelessness. They assume the marginalised groups will be stuck in the muck forever without recourse for improvement. Well, there is news for them. Collectively, many have leapfrogged from their Sisyphus-like struggles and bootstrapped themselves to prosperity. 

But the world is stuck in its own ways. By adhering to their old narratives, the non-marginalised ones give a pat to themselves, thinking that they are serving the marginalised by bringing their plight to the fore. The truth is that that is a fiction, The American Fiction. The liberals believe that representation among minorities is only valid if the narrative follows a preset traditional stereotype. Any deviation from this would nullify the voice of the majority. The reality is that the world has changed, but not the thinking of some. 

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One World, One Love, One Vision?

Dedicated to a follower, HS, who enjoyed the post on Lotus and asked whether a 'one world' can ever exist where we do things for the greater good of mankind and where the need of the collective supersedes that of an individual.

We are told that race is healthy. The human race is moving forward from cave-dwelling nomads to space-exploring nations by this very trait, the race to be better than the other.

Nature is hostile. It does not care two hoots for the weak and the slow. It shows its mighty fury to those who cross its path. Only the fittest survive. Biology transmits this survival trait to the next generation so that the memory of how to thwart that adversity is implanted in their DNA.
But we are told we have six senses, unlike members of the animal kingdom. We have developed empathy and compassion for the weak and the downtrodden. Still, the only thing keeping us from killing each other is the law, fear of retribution for our actions in this life, the next, or the afterlife if rebirth is not on the menu. Communal living with rules ensured that even the weaker of its people would be taken care of, barring which nothing is going to stop from punching another blue-black or kicking away the walking stick of the invalid and laughing his eyes out. Lurking deep in the crevices of the grey matter is the dormant reptilian brain, which is triggered whenever the gatekeepers take a break. The desire to dominate is there. The carefree attitude of surrounding to the pleasures of the physical body can easily be bargained for.

The world has all the resources to meet human needs, but not its greed. The idea of universal equality is only a utopian dream which is as common as a flying pink elephant. When we are poor, we demand equality, fair play and a level playing field. The idea of socialism and communism fascinates us. As we climb the ladder of prosperity, our desire never to part with our hard-earned money declines exponentially. We realise that our wealth is worth every drop of sweat that comes through our pores. Parting was not just sentimental but unnecessary as we reminisced the hungry nights we endured in pursuit of prosperity. We tell ourselves life is very fickle and we must prepare for a rainy day. Some call it greed; others call it wise planning. Empathy knocks in a different form. We do not want our offspring to endure the hardship we had to experience. Also, leaving a legacy behind is nice! We are often told the need for one is only as important as the collective! It has been ingrained in us the idea that Lady Justice is blind to external interferences. She only metes justice as it is, irrespective of the offender's status, race, creed and intellectual prowess. What we are not told is justice is all about how deep-pocketed the suspect is. If favourable sentences are not obtained, one can go on and on higher on the levels of courts available in the legal system. Justice can be bought with all the money one can pay. For political offences, as judges have political affiliations, one wonders how impartial they are.

Even the treatment of various accused is glaringly different. A leader who foolishly (or wilfully) siphoned off the nation's coffers saunters to the court with his flashy designer suits, whereas a couple of mischievous motorcyclists who decided to film their dangerous motorcycle stunts get dragged to the courts in orange police-lockup overalls handcuffed under the flashes journalists' flash camera. And do not get me started on selective prosecution of political and even civil cases by the Attorney General Chambers. Those who followed the path of communism/socialism soon realised the longer it stayed in power, the more it looked like the systems it wanted to eradicate. It believed it wanted to replace the hegemony of Romanov over the peasant land. Fast forward, we see Russia being run by oligarchs. The short-lived satiety came to be replaced with hyperinflation and Kafkaian governmental squeeze. The distribution of wealth has a funny way of redistribution even if all the world's wealth is divided equally amongst its population. Experiences from COVID-19, slum population and national calamity are testimony to this.

All the things that we wanted the world to be - One World, One Vision, One Way of Thinking- are just piped dreams. Listening to Oprah and her talk show, we thought we could change the world with a rational Western way of thinking. Bob Marley tried to change the world with 'One Love' and his message to get together and feel alright. And Beatles with 'All You Need is Love'. Then we grew up. We realise that the economy has to trickle down. We cannot expect society to benefit solely from a 'trickle-up' economy. The world is chaotic; it will always be, and within that churning sea of chaos, there will be a constant flow that moves things forward. The little eddy currents happen, but the essential thing is the forward propulsion of the human race. Along the way, there are bound to be casualties of civilisations and people not acclimatised to change.

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Life is a battlefield!

My body and mind went overdrive as things typically do while partaking in one of those age-defying mindless Sunday morning recreational run-cycle-run combo of Powerman Malaysia 2023 Edition. Staying mindful of the traffic flow of fellow madmen, the condition of the roads, my heart rate, race timing, the remaining distance to cover and gears, I had my hands figuratively full on top of everything else I was doing.

Behind it all, buffering silently in the background, basking in the inebriation of all sanguineous perfusion of flurry vascular tributaries is the creative part of the brain. It wants to keep up with the rest of the body. It, too, tries its hand at neuroplasticity. It sprouts out dendrites to establish long-lost connexions. And it engages in its internal soliloquy. I just happened to be there eavesdropping the murmur. 

Life is a battlefield. In modern times, the enemies we are supposed to fight are no longer the co-creations created in His image but the one in the mirror. The demons have all gone internal, so we tell ourselves. The jihad that they were fighting to steamroll our ideology has gone underground. Now, it seems jihad refers to fighting the inner demons.

Now, we are supposed to be kind to each other, come together and feel alright. We are not supposed to be having ill feelings towards the other. Instead of all these, we should focus on fighting the inner demons that lurk within us. Then there will be heaven on Earth. 

In real life, it does not work this way. In Nature, there is a constant need to push to a higher level. It is a question of the survival of the fittest. Darwin proposed it. We condemned it but cannot sweep the reality under the carpet. 

Even as a newbie starts cycling, running or trekking, he always tries to keep up with the group's oldest and weakest link. If he can reach the stage when he can outperform the slowest of the pack, he knows he has qualified to be a legitimate fellow group participant. 

You are given one life, not to brood over but to make the best

despite all the seemingly unending adversities that come and 

go. Sisyphus, given the life sentence of rolling the boulder up

the hill will have to find joy in reaching the pinnacle, 

knowing very well that the boulder will roll down and he has to

repeat the process again and again.

When training for a competition, a participant has to train with someone stronger than himself to improve. During the actual event, he has to benchmark himself against the better ones if he were to outdo himself. There is no meaning in merely pushing ourselves to improve without a yardstick to follow. In competitive mode, we look for prey, the feared 'the other' and the potentially beatable. We want to improve our standing by overtaking others, one at a time.

There is a place for active competition. The world is cruel and does not give concessions to the weak. So, affirmative action will work only in a short time. When used indiscriminately, it would be counterproductive. Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times. (G. Michael Hopf)

Like it or not, we improve as a human race by challenging the status quo. Jealousy can be a healthy virtue as long as to push oneself, but not in destruction. But he would be devastated, nevertheless. As long as he knows, he will return bigger and stronger. 

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