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Hello again… Exams end in a week’s time. I really wonder who on earth was it behind the whole “lets put first year law student’s exams right at the end” plan. I’d like to give him/her a nice kick. And probably tell him/her to take a long walk off a short pier too after I’m done.



I hope that the last photo leaves many of you GT freaks with an adequate solution to the long and boring tracks. Believe me it really is quite effective. It kills your mileage though… and your HP in the process. Already my Escudo is clocking 1000+ kilometres due to my rubber-band stunt. But it was worth it though. In the end, I netted myself over 1,000,000 to cover my modal (capital) on the Escudo, 3 Corvettes, 1 Pink Ford Focus(?) Rally Car and ONE FORMULA ONE CAR! Woot!



And GT4 is coming out soon too! DOUBLE WOOT!



On the subject of a different sort of race, Kerol has written a brilliant piece on the subject of race in Malaysia. Here’s the link. You might want to pay him a visit.



Click on more on my reply to his article. It’s not deep… but the article did a successful job at making me think hard enough to warrant me to whip up a quick reply.





Read Kerol’s Article here.

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I agree with many of your views, Kerol in your article. I think alot of us realise that there is still a social divide in our Malaysian society with respect to race. It seems that even with racial integration in schools, it doesn’t (?) seem to be working as well as it should based on your St. John’s observations.



I’m from Taman Tun but went to SRK Sri Petaling in PJ where I guess we were all pretty naive to the whole race issue back then when making friends. As far as I can recall, there were no visible gangs or cliques divided by race. I had fun playing catching and pepsi-cola with friends from all races. In fact, thru Friendster, I’ve found quite a number of them and we more or less still keep in touch.



In secondary school however, I went to Malay College. Budu will be able to tell you more personally how the College tries to instill racial patriotism and tries to hammer into us about how we, as Malays must learn to buck up or else, might land up being 2nd class citizens ourselves. At that stage, I would say that I too blindly followed that train of thought.



But things took a different turn after SPM. I was ‘shipped’, quite reluctantly at that time to Kolej Tuanku Ja’afar. Now this is a school for being infamously known from it’s (kononnya) snobbish, elitist, rich and students. It was quite shocking for me the first few days as I had just spend the last 5 years in a single race, almost mono-language school. I found it rather difficult to fit in at first. I couldn’t believe it – I was facing culture shock in my own country (and my own home state too)! I reckon though, that I soon got used to it, telling myself that there is no reason why I should single out myself just because the Malays constitute the minority; race should never be an issue when making friends. To this day, I remain close to many of my KTJ buddies. Perhaps my sentiments echo that of your own.



However, when I read articles by those who openly assess the racial divide, they sometimes do not provide an effective solution to the problem. Perhaps its simply the way I choose to look at things being a lawyer-in-training :) We are taught to identify the “problem”, asess if there IS a problem, choose a solution and provide a suitable remedy, often in that order.

For me, the subtle racial segregation is a problem indeed. Racial bigotry has to end, and that would probably mean the end of special treatment of the bumiputras. Is this the inevitable end? I believe so – I think that the Malays will eventually need to learn to stand up to the “horrors” of meritocracy. Race should not be an abusable trump card. It should only be a way for one to understand his or her cultural belonging.



My solution: reform the education system. How is it that we were so oblivious to racial issues when we were young? I do not think one is “born” a bigot. Only when he is aware of the innate differences between individuals and the issues that rise due to those differences will he/she become one. Perhaps the panacea is to knock down the language barrier; I wrote a bit on this on Budu’s tagboard after his last BM Cerpen on WBB (the 10:30 one – can’t remember the title). Maybe the primary emphasis in primary school should not be maths and science, but the mastery of languages instead. I wish very much so that I know how to speak Mandarin/Tamil and would personally have no qualms about sending my child insya-Allah to a Chinese school just for the sake of learning a third language. Besides, they produce excellent results!



Great article though and the quote right at the end was good as well. Perhaps we are all being influenced by the ending of American History X (ending all essays in quotes, cuz other ppl have said it better LOL).



Oh Kerol, you might want to check out your layout code. It doesn’t fare too well if browsed under Opera. Then again, surfers like me only constitute 1% of the overall surfing population :(

Cheers and keep on writing!


– Reza Baharin @ Zaaba
– http://www.truedeath.com