Parents' worst fears, public debates and the green movement

Dear Kam,
I’m bored at work. I want to do something different with my life but it’s not a good time. Got any suggestions?
Alternative
via email
I recently saw a TV commercial for a bank, which I found very amusing. It’s not meant to be funny but it made me laugh because it captures perfectly a parent’s (especially an Asian parent’s) worst nightmare. In the commercial, a family is sitting for dinner when the daughter tells some shocking news. The father is stunned but he manages to say, “You’ve just finished three years of medical school and now you want to be an artist?!” I can imagine many fathers waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night screaming, “You want to be an artist? After all the money I paid? And there was no Mara loan!” His wife will soothe him back to sleep, telling him it was just a bad dream and that their daughter has just done her exams at Dublin University. “But it seemed so real, we were eating kangkong.”

The purpose of the TV commercial is to tell us that the kindly and understanding bank wants us to save for the bad times as well as the good, and they don’t get much worse than when your daughter tells you she wants to be an artist. Later in the commercial, we discover that daddy will support his daughter and bankroll her artistic dreams with money he had put away (in the bank) over the years. Presumably, she will eventually get bored of art, return to medicine and get a lucrative job as a cardiologist in Pantai Medical Centre, or better still, in Australia. She can do her painting on the weekends, but get your degree first! 

It’s a very clever commercial because it neatly gets to the heart of some people’s worst fears. And fear is an excellent tool (just ask Umno). It is a reality in this world that risking your future to follow some uncertain dream of being an artist is either very brave or very foolish. Personally, I’d like to see a world where the exact opposite is true: “You’ve just finished three years of clown school and now you want to be an investment banker?!” I think that kind of world would be much more fun.

Actually, this is an important subject. Many people want to have a creative outlet, but it has been drummed into us from an early age that the arts are a pointless luxury (it’s not taught in school). We all need to express ourselves creatively, but it doesn’t need to be about becoming an artist or even painting on the weekends. The most mundane job or raising a family can be a creative process if you treat it like it’s a work of art. Oops, I’m sounding like Oprah.

Dear Kam,
What’s going on with this BTN stuff?
Civic Conscious
via email
A row has broken out over the National Civics Bureau (BTN). It’s not surprising that anybody should question the need for BTN because the doctrines taught on these courses sound, well, obnoxious. I’ve never had to attend any of these things myself but obviously, I know people who have and it doesn’t sound good. The lectures for Malays sound particularly, er, odd. I’m not going to describe them because that would require research on my part and, besides, you probably know more about it than I. It’s hard to see how anybody can legitimise such crude and expensive propaganda in this day and age (it’s now the 21st century, by the way). 

An interesting aspect has been the war of words between an ex-PM and a sitting minister, calling each other racists, or calling themselves racists. It gets confusing. Actually, this is a very healthy thing because it’s good to see an important issue actually being debated in the public forum, with a strong argument in its defence being countered by strong arguments not only by the opposition but also the government itself. The argument is often clumsy because we’re not used to a real debate. But people might want to take the opportunity to get used to making cogent, sane and persuasive arguments because, like it or not, that’s where we’re heading. Nobody seems to have noticed but in actual fact the old ways are already dead. People are now being judged by what they say and do, and it’s not enough to simply state it and presume it has been believed.

We look forward to the demise of BTN and all the other ridiculous courses. We don’t need them and we’re not that stupid (we’re quite stupid, but not that stupid). Some will think we do need them. It must be nice living in a perpetual 1981. The music was better then and Ultravox’s Vienna was at the top of the charts.

Dear Kam,
There’s a big climate conference going on in Copenhagen. What’s Malaysia doing?
Hot, Hot, Hot
via email
I saw a frontpage headline that got me excited. It said “Rising Greens”. I thought this must mean that the green movement was finally sweeping through Malaysia. I thought that now we would take to the streets with our celery sticks, humous dips and hemp underwear. But then I discovered that the newspaper was reporting a 200% rise in vegetable prices, which is not good.

But the green movement has already arrived. It’s an issue that most of us would agree upon, regardless of our political affiliations. We’d like to see our government and opposition take environmental issues seriously. It’s the future. Or we could carry on with “turning a blind eye”, which doesn’t offer much of a future.

Malaysian guru Kam Raslan imparts his wisdom to readers every week.

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This article appeared in Options, the lifestyle pullout of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 785, Dec 14-20, 2009.