No amount of help will ever be enough, but any help will do. We need to help our Malaysian Indian community progress faster. How much has the New Economic Policy (NEP) helped the Indians? What then must all of us do? There is still too much infighting and problems of succession amongst the Indian Malaysians. Power is concentrated in the hands of the few. There is no evidence of transformative leadership. There is the ethos of overstaying one’s welcome and not giving enough room for younger, brighter, more ethical and energetic leadership to emerge. These ‘fights’ must stop for the sanity of Malaysians in general.
A revolution is needed in the minds of the Indians. The revolution must be translated into praxis. Had all the warring factions of the Indian leadership spent less time arguing and torching newspapers and started reading what the chapters of the Bhagavad Gita (The Song of the Lord) said about greed, lust, power, the divine and the demonic self – the Indian population in the long run would be better off.
There is so much wisdom in this timeless text of the Bhagavad Gita that it can also be used to engineer profound social changes based on the philosophy of self-help/participatory democracy in the Indian community. There is the potential of embracing the philosophy of ‘kampongism’ – one that prioritises pastoralism and participatory democracy over profit-driven and parochial demono-cracy.
Multicultural marhaenism
It is time for the other races to engage in serious and sincere gotong-royong to help the poorest of the poor amongst the Indians. It is time that we become possessed with a new spirit of multicultural marhaenism. The great Indonesian leader Ahmed Soekarno popularised the concept of marhaenism as an antidote to the ideological battle against materialism, colonialism, dependency and imperialism. The thought that the top 10 percent of the richest Malaysians are earning more than 20 times compared to the 90 percent of the population is terrifying. What has become of this nation that promised a just distribution of wealth at the onset of Independence?
I have a perspective to resolve the issue of the Indian community.
The Malays and the Chinese too need to help the Indians progress. Malay and Chinese multimillionaires and billionaires can set up grants to help the poor Indians succeed in all fields of human endeavour. The Malays can get MARA (Majlis Amanah Rakyat) to share ideas, expertise and technology to make Indian children succeed and learn entrepreneurship skills.
The same strategies of affirmative action given to the Malays must be extended to the Indians and designed for their children. The Chinese can help with sharing of good business strategies that will help the Indian community create opportunities for their children. Indian graduates can continue to help the children of the less fortunate ones see the importance of education so that we will not see high dropout rates. They can help initiate the establishment of good boarding schools ala Mara Junior Science College (MRSM) to help bright Indian children from poor families succeed. Indian millionaires and billionaires can help create as many philanthropic organisations as they can to offer financial help based on merit and needs. Malay and Chinese teachers can volunteer to be transferred to predominantly Indian schools in the estates in order to see for themselves how much help people of other races need.
Those tens of thousands of unemployed graduates need to be trained as teachers and sent to the most economically-depressed schools in order to learn what social justice means and how to help solve social problems irrespective of race, creed, colour and religious orientation. Education is a gentle and humane enterprise that ought to teach teachers to fight prejudice, intolerance and to educate each child as if the child is his/her own. Each child is a gift, a bundle of love and joy, a khalifatullah (vicegerent of God) and an opportunity for the teacher to develop his/her fullest potential. Poverty creates more children that will have less resources and more emotional stress. Poverty must be eradicated regardless of race, creed, ethnicity and national origin.
Not an Indian problem
It is not an Indian problem. It is problem of humanity. Poverty cuts across racial lines. It is now a class issue that requires class struggle. Poverty creates mass anger and can result in revolutions. How much longer must the Indians suffer? They have helped build this nation we now call Malaysia. Their work in the rubber plantations has helped Henry Ford expand his global empire and Proton to spin its wheels of fortune. We are shackled too much by greed. The conversation between Arjuna and Krishna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra is not about a ‘battle’. It is about a jihad and a crusade against the injustices of man against man, man against nature and man against himself.
Stop fighting – think of what we are fighting for? But first, understand what the Gita, Sutras, Ramayana, Mahabharatta, Quran, Bible, etc. say about fighting over wealth and power. We’ll all be humbled and will soon discover that all these will be left behind, in a world structured as maya and samsara (sengsara as the Malays would term it). Our common enemy is greed, materialism, militarism and corruption. That’s our Mahabharata – our great war!
Our common enemy is our insatiable urge to acquire arta (harta in Malay, wealth in English). We have been building structures of oppression and setting up international advisory panels to help us plunder the natives in the name of development and Vision 2020. We do not understand enough the meaning of “trickle down” in capitalism, as we continue to create wealth that trickles up and finally flown outside of the country into bank accounts in Switzerland, Bahamas, and Cayman Islands. We then claim that we are nationalists when those things we do are for our self-interest and greed at the expense of the rural, urban and middle class poor struggling to make ends meet and not knowing who has been making their lives chaotic.
Help the poor
A reminder to the wealthy and powerful. Help develop the poor – especially those from the Indian community. Detach yourself from your wealth, as the Bhagavad Gita, Sutras, Quran, Bible, Granth Sahib, etc, would ask you to. The wealth that you have acquired is not yours – they are those of the children of the poor and of the orphaned.
You must learn what ‘detachment from worldly possessions’ means in the context of a cutthroat economic system like ours. It is time to understand how our lives are connected in a complex web of power, ideology, technology and consciousness.
Help restructure the lives of the abject poor before they help totally restructure the lives of the filthy rich.
14/10/09
A revolution is needed in the minds of the Indians. The revolution must be translated into praxis. Had all the warring factions of the Indian leadership spent less time arguing and torching newspapers and started reading what the chapters of the Bhagavad Gita (The Song of the Lord) said about greed, lust, power, the divine and the demonic self – the Indian population in the long run would be better off.
There is so much wisdom in this timeless text of the Bhagavad Gita that it can also be used to engineer profound social changes based on the philosophy of self-help/participatory democracy in the Indian community. There is the potential of embracing the philosophy of ‘kampongism’ – one that prioritises pastoralism and participatory democracy over profit-driven and parochial demono-cracy.
Multicultural marhaenism
It is time for the other races to engage in serious and sincere gotong-royong to help the poorest of the poor amongst the Indians. It is time that we become possessed with a new spirit of multicultural marhaenism. The great Indonesian leader Ahmed Soekarno popularised the concept of marhaenism as an antidote to the ideological battle against materialism, colonialism, dependency and imperialism. The thought that the top 10 percent of the richest Malaysians are earning more than 20 times compared to the 90 percent of the population is terrifying. What has become of this nation that promised a just distribution of wealth at the onset of Independence?
I have a perspective to resolve the issue of the Indian community.
The Malays and the Chinese too need to help the Indians progress. Malay and Chinese multimillionaires and billionaires can set up grants to help the poor Indians succeed in all fields of human endeavour. The Malays can get MARA (Majlis Amanah Rakyat) to share ideas, expertise and technology to make Indian children succeed and learn entrepreneurship skills.
The same strategies of affirmative action given to the Malays must be extended to the Indians and designed for their children. The Chinese can help with sharing of good business strategies that will help the Indian community create opportunities for their children. Indian graduates can continue to help the children of the less fortunate ones see the importance of education so that we will not see high dropout rates. They can help initiate the establishment of good boarding schools ala Mara Junior Science College (MRSM) to help bright Indian children from poor families succeed. Indian millionaires and billionaires can help create as many philanthropic organisations as they can to offer financial help based on merit and needs. Malay and Chinese teachers can volunteer to be transferred to predominantly Indian schools in the estates in order to see for themselves how much help people of other races need.
Those tens of thousands of unemployed graduates need to be trained as teachers and sent to the most economically-depressed schools in order to learn what social justice means and how to help solve social problems irrespective of race, creed, colour and religious orientation. Education is a gentle and humane enterprise that ought to teach teachers to fight prejudice, intolerance and to educate each child as if the child is his/her own. Each child is a gift, a bundle of love and joy, a khalifatullah (vicegerent of God) and an opportunity for the teacher to develop his/her fullest potential. Poverty creates more children that will have less resources and more emotional stress. Poverty must be eradicated regardless of race, creed, ethnicity and national origin.
Not an Indian problem
It is not an Indian problem. It is problem of humanity. Poverty cuts across racial lines. It is now a class issue that requires class struggle. Poverty creates mass anger and can result in revolutions. How much longer must the Indians suffer? They have helped build this nation we now call Malaysia. Their work in the rubber plantations has helped Henry Ford expand his global empire and Proton to spin its wheels of fortune. We are shackled too much by greed. The conversation between Arjuna and Krishna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra is not about a ‘battle’. It is about a jihad and a crusade against the injustices of man against man, man against nature and man against himself.
Stop fighting – think of what we are fighting for? But first, understand what the Gita, Sutras, Ramayana, Mahabharatta, Quran, Bible, etc. say about fighting over wealth and power. We’ll all be humbled and will soon discover that all these will be left behind, in a world structured as maya and samsara (sengsara as the Malays would term it). Our common enemy is greed, materialism, militarism and corruption. That’s our Mahabharata – our great war!
Our common enemy is our insatiable urge to acquire arta (harta in Malay, wealth in English). We have been building structures of oppression and setting up international advisory panels to help us plunder the natives in the name of development and Vision 2020. We do not understand enough the meaning of “trickle down” in capitalism, as we continue to create wealth that trickles up and finally flown outside of the country into bank accounts in Switzerland, Bahamas, and Cayman Islands. We then claim that we are nationalists when those things we do are for our self-interest and greed at the expense of the rural, urban and middle class poor struggling to make ends meet and not knowing who has been making their lives chaotic.
Help the poor
A reminder to the wealthy and powerful. Help develop the poor – especially those from the Indian community. Detach yourself from your wealth, as the Bhagavad Gita, Sutras, Quran, Bible, Granth Sahib, etc, would ask you to. The wealth that you have acquired is not yours – they are those of the children of the poor and of the orphaned.
You must learn what ‘detachment from worldly possessions’ means in the context of a cutthroat economic system like ours. It is time to understand how our lives are connected in a complex web of power, ideology, technology and consciousness.
Help restructure the lives of the abject poor before they help totally restructure the lives of the filthy rich.
14/10/09
3 comments:
We all pity and would like to help the poor and oppressed but there are limits.
Firstly, you anehs go and back stab the ONLY political party in the country brave and sincere enough to fight for the Indians. Imagine squatters getting
RM 200,000.00 homes. My Chinese friends only got RM 20,000 as compensation in Johor and the Malays in Johor Bahru recently got shit in this bastion of UMNO. That is probably what the KPB clowns will get too if Penang is under Barisan rule today. Do you know why? Squatters under the Torrens system left behind by the whites do not give squatters any rights over a piece of property they are sitting on. Then, you same clowns voted overwhelmingly for a corrupt UMNO leader in Bagan Pinang hoping that UMNO will give you something. UMNO will give you Indians something alright. Crumbs, nothing but bloody crumbs.
Now go to the UMNO racial supremacist in MARA and ask them to help Indians because the Indians voted for UMNO in Bagan Pinang. Then wait for these racial bastards to spit on you. You brainless dolts deserve to remain poor and stupid.
Can anyone help the Malaysian Indians now?
No one wants to for you clowns show no gratitude when others put their necks on the block for you. No one has to for the Bagan Pinang election results clearly shows that the Indians having back stabbed their saviors have to go crawling to the UMNO oppressors who spat on and kicked their heads in Selangor after ramming them in the back for 52 years. Get ready for more misery, miserable Indians.
These are exact umno political agenda,first caused problem within mic then mca.Can't you see for once how najib is playing his cards? With money and power anything is possible.The moment umno realized the danger of indian and chinese unity it's catastrophe for their own survival.As long as unstable situation persist it's idle for umno to divide and rule,so wakeup.
Dei! Vinnan China Aneh NO:1
We know who you are. You are clearly a DAP in the PKR. Indians don't need DAP"s help any nome. However, DAP always need Indians help and votes in order for them to win the election.
Poor Indians learned their lesson by voting for DAP and PKR in the Kg Buah Pala issue. HRP is right in telling the INDIANS not to vote for both Barisan National and PKR. Indians always left out after the winings of GE.
One must understand that the Indians have their constitutional rights and equal opportunities rights since independance 1957. However, these rights was not given by the ruling government.
The God has wake up the Indians through HINDRAF. No one can cheat the Indians any more in Malaysia. The Indians will fight for the constitutional rights through HRP.
The Indians don't need to beg from anyone. Vinna, so you better watch out.
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