happy days are here again?

i have a job!! yep! hv been working since july 1, believe it or not? and yes, i’ve decided on the singaporean company. why? well, first … i badly need a job … okay, i wouldn’t have taken the offer if they had not offered more than a thousand increase from my last salary. alhamdulillah … i can soon pay off my debts! secondly, it’s only ten minutes’ drive from my home. third, eventhough it’s not the most ideal of situations … i’m quite familiar with the job scope, ie it’s not something i have to learn from scratch. so, i don’t really have to stress myself out trying to learn something new or try to do a perfect job (like i’m wont to do) and can concentrate on the stuff i really love doing, on my free time. hey, at least i don’t hv to wade through crazy KL traffic and i’m not tired when i get home, like in the days when i was working in KL. argh. KL traffic jam is the worst!

anyways … are happy days here again … ? well, as always, there are ups and downs.

one of the downs is … being accused of doing something ‘immoral’ in the eyes of the so-called neighbourhood ‘moral police’ (this is how i describe them). will write on this in another post. i had only just recently emerged from a cold war with my parents because of this.

as for my job … the first few days were tough coz i felt like i was in a foreign country. i am the only malay. the rest of the less than 10 staff are all chinese and they spoke mandarin 95% of the time. not becoz they were deliberately trying to alienate me. basically, their english and malay is …. to put it mildly … not very fluent. and i speak only malay and english. so … you can imagine how weird i felt when they were laughing crazily at someone’s joke and i couldn’t understand a word of it. sigh. feels like being in a country like france or well … china!

segregated education system leads to racial polarisation?

Read this:

Vernacular schools exact high price in national unity

JUNE 27 — Perhaps the most immutable constant in Malaysian politics is vernacular education. Almost anything can be subject to negotiation – people grumble, and then they get over it – but touch vernacular schools, and you can expect an immense backlash from the non-Malay communities.

The non-Malays will sit down and accept your questioning their right to be Malaysian citizens, but the moment you suggest that the present system of vernacular education is detrimental in any way to the country’s future, they will rise up in anger.

The problem is, vernacular schools do harm the country. There are significant downsides to the present way we run our education system; they may be outweighed by stronger benefits, but even so, we must accept that we have to pay a high price in terms of national unity for the present structure of our education system.

The clearest benefit of vernacular schools is that they help non-Malay students master their mother tongue. Many people who did not attend a vernacular school, including myself, regret our poor command of our mother tongue. This is unquestionably an important function of vernacular education, too easily and frequently glossed over by people who claim to champion national unity.

Unfortunately, the way the present system functions is that non-Malay parents who want their children to learn Chinese or Tamil will send their children to vernacular schools, and everyone else will send their children to national schools. The obvious problem that arises is that national schools become effectively Malay schools.

Only a very small number of national schools have a non-negligible amount of non-Malay students, and they are overwhelmingly concentrated in a few urban areas. Common figures I see quoted in the media indicate that over 90% of Chinese students attend a Chinese vernacular primary school, while over 70% of Tamil students attend a Tamil vernacular primary school. We have effectively established a segregated school system.

more …

my comments will follow … [busy at the moment )