i just had a very depressing morning/afternoon at a dialogue with a minister. for context, we were just the few university students in a full auditorium of attendees from various malay/muslim organizations
i think at this kinds of things i just re-learned the absolutely widespread, diverse kinds of problems that affect us (trying to refrain from saying “our community”) and re-realized the almost impossibility of trying to solve them
for starters i quite detest when we commend politicians for deflecting/answering questions tactfully when we obviously mean that they don’t directly tackle the questions or provide satisfactory answers, sigh
questions ranged from, delivery professions and how do we protect youths from undertaking them full-time/equip them with more relevant skills, to general inequality, to malay misrepresentation in the forces, to chinese privilege, madrasahs etc.
and there were no satisfactory answers, the most common reply was essentially we need to help one another, keep learning/acquiring relevant skills, and take more skillsfuture courses, before completely shifting the question to a personal/unrelated example/story.
I think we’ve said to death how the answer simply can’t be help yourself/try harder, nor the one success story as compelling evidence to deny many crippling issues.
outside, we had a discussion on definitions of success, primarily a shift outside academics. A super important question is, who gets to decide this? Definitely different segments of the society believes in different things, but when opportunities come knocking and ask for certs
will our empty hands be the fault of changing definitions of success? There’s only so much we can do to help ourselves, and even then we can’t even do that right.
Later (and also when we first met), we were also talking about being malay in general, and in uni. Even then we’re different. Some feel no need to identify/interact with others, and some crave and need that familiarity. There’s only so few of us.
I just personally find it extremely lonely. Especially when there are so many different kinds of people (there is no fault in this), it’s possible to feel like a minority out of a minority. Who else can I talk to about being malay?
Then there is the burden of being the representative, especially so being a minority. Suddenly I have to have to know everything wrong/right, or provide a representative view of “the community.” No one person can “represent the community”!
I did ask someone about this, and they said that it’s very possible to grow up distant from your own culture/heritage, one can just read up about it later. I then wonder if I’m self-appropriating my own culture ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But that’s down another rabbit hole. I’m back in school, wondering if anything productive was done today. Who can we rely on to fix these problems, are our ambitions realistic, and what will the future look like? i’m sad, and thanks for coming to my ted talk.
