it means malay will not vanish from the earth, and i believe it was a quote from Hang Tuah.. i rmb we used this quote on our MCS shirt.. oh wait, we did, im wearing that shirt rite now.. haha..

anw, i guess in an attempt to improve our Malay, me, Jah, and Clare all tried to sing Malay songs while travelling from Central Library to MacDonald’s at Engin.. the first thing Clare said to me when she saw me was “sebisa mungkin, tak akan, pernah, sayang ku akan hilang..” which is a line from the song My Heart.. i guess i should be flattered that she sang that to me, only she sang it in the most annoying sappy manner (and its most probably for marc).. but oh well, im impressed she’s learning the lyrics fast.. if not before this, she would be substituting the romantic lines of the lyrics with food vocabulary like “telur goreng, nasi padang, ayam, itik, tak bawang”.. its usually the kind of things she order at hawker centres or at the canteen..

following that, after Macs, SOMEHOW we decided to reminisced on the good old dikir barat days in JC, and me and Clare started singing back the dikir song (which is in Malay).. since NUS was pretty much ghost town just now, we belted (or screamed) our lungs out with “DALAM MENCARI ERTI, ERTI KEHIDUPAN INI… MENGAPA HARUS KITA BERBAKTI!!! MELAKSANA SEGALA MISI DAN VISI… EH WAU BULAN!!! GEYLANG SIPAKU GEYLANG, GEYLANG SI RAMA-RAMA..” and that sparked off a Malay National Day sing-song session, which Jah the Indian partook in as well.. she sounded like Saloma in “Di Tanjung Katong”.. and she started doing some kind of Malay Dance.. i think it was from all the sugar rush of the coke she was drinking at Macs..

so i guess its good that while there are malays like me (and ella, as she has so willingly admitted, hehe) who are deteriorating in our mother tongue language proficiency, there are ppl from other races who are not only learning Malay, but are getting good at it and are willing to sing it at the top of their voices.. i was pretty proud of Clare by then, until at the library, when she saw a friend of hers, and asked me in Malay “dia handsome, kau?”… she wanted to ask “dia handsome, tak?”…

anw, im a little brain-woozy from lit tutorial just now, the stuff we discussed was really deep and mind-boggling.. for instance, ever wondered about war, like the Vietnam War, the war on terrorism and lalala? when we look at these wars, it seems so clear cut from a lot of people’s point of view, that the Good Knight US was battling the Evil Monster Communists and terrorists.. it seemed to be a battle between the Good Democracy over the Evil ‘other ideological belief systems’.. but really, when we think about this idea of good and bad, of value systems per se, whether political, religious, or moral, who are we really to enact which value system is good and which is bad? after all, weren’t we all brought up under some kind of influence of one value system or another already? like I grew up with democratic values being ingrained into me, so having already been coloured by one value system, what gives me the right to say my value system is the best, while autocracy or communism or fundamentalism is bad? how many of our values, if we really reflect, are involuntarily ours, or are they all shaped by the society and the influences we grew up in.. in our history texts, the good guys and the bad guys are so clearly laid out for us… Hitler is Evil, Roosevelt is Good, Stalin is Evil, the Japanese are Evil etc.. but what really gives us the right to judge these people? (for the record, i am NOT defending Hitler, i really think he deserves a pineapple shoved up his ass) when we impose some sort of ethical judgement on these people, or on any other random people we meet in our everyday lives, we are doing it based on the values and ethics created by the society we grew up in.. but who created this value system? its created, always, by the conqueror’s voice, the voice of the winner who gets to live the day and gets to decide what is put into our books, our education system.. including History books.. History itself, is not impartial.. no history book, or academic text, gives us an objective view of what happened, whether it was World War Two, or the Crusades, or the Roman Empire.. history is the voice of the person who has won..

p.s… am i making any sense? as usual, im rambling..