Oxfords Not Brogues

Eggsy, this country is going to SHITE!!!!!!!!

It's been a long long time since I have been here.

My absence has not been due to idleness. Nor was it a demise on anyone's part....unless it is my faith in leadership of course.

 

Last month, some ninety days after I submitted the answers to a questionnaire, the training captain finally had the time to peruse my answer and in exasperation that I could not yet understand, withdrew my line proficiency status. Well, the grapevine had it that the clients were curious about our landing fuel state and wondered why we had ample fuel consistently after every return to base. I became the first experiment to identify the prevailing fuel calculation by way of a scenario pop quiz to be written and submitted, and I had in a spell of blind-sidedness, under duress from tinnitus owing to a profanity-spewing menopausal right-hand-seat fellow screaming at me during my FAMs, inversed the formula and then glory be!! did they come down hard on me. As the scramble to identify whose fault it was that a non-novice to offshore flying could miscalculate so gloriously grew in urgency, I was placed on the training managers' remedies. It wasn't pretty, but I pulled through. Hence my absence.

 

And in the meantime, we have had to suffer indignity after indignity of failed leadership in media exposes amidst a personal scuffle between a former and serving Prime Minister.

 

The worst precipitation of this leadership event-horizon came in the form of the Low Yatt Plaza brawl and its attendant copycat crimes buoyant in its wake. I am appalled that any social experiment or mobilisation exercise would be at the cost of blood upon the fabric of our society. What makes it worse, is the disregard for humanity that such sleight of hand incurs. This isn't the first nor will it be the last time for flashpoints, as hate crimes have been with us a while now. The impunity thereof, is telling. If I were to place my trust in social media alone, I am worried that the hatemongers have outbred the peacemakers. There are so many of them under the employment of ill-intended NGOs, and my beef is that our taxes are funding such hatred. What a bunch of masochists we must be that we pay so much to be flogged with regular social scourges such as this.

 

I cannot harbour this rivalry of Cain. I am a racist of sorts, most assuredly, but I am a racist in humour. There are racial and cultural stereotypes that form a lose and disputable ethnic set of properties for each one of us, at which we can learn to laugh at ourselves with the next bloke in a massive icebreaker, or carry it as an indelible insult like a permanent chip on our shoulders.

Just as we love picking the least sonorous amongst us to be semi-permanently assigned the karaoke microphone for comic relief, I have been dragged in kicking and screaming to represent my squadron in the annual heated sepak takraw tournament, kononnya Cina tak boleh main sepak takraw la tu. And while it was in my case evidently true judging from the resounding laughter at my martial-arts kicks in the court, I will never forget the supportive cheering each time I kicked the rattan ball across the net, and the wild congratulations when my team actually won. Heck, way back, my Non-Commissioned Officers who tortured me well and good in the Royal Military College would yell all forms of racial slurs at me and my other friends till we weren't sure whether we should just surrender and laugh out loud to our peril, or surrender to the desire to hurl what horrid breakfasts we had as we floundered out of breath at the obstacle course.

 

"Woi Melayu pemalas, panjat tali pun tak boleh ke?!!!" they would erroneously bellow at me, themselves being Malay seeming to be irrelevant to their agenda.

 

"Saya Cina staf!!!!"

 

"Busuk punya Cina, berak tak basuh! Cepat panjat tali, jangan buang masa jurulatih ni. Bukan adik adik saya kamu ni semua!"

 

And then as they whipped us with their whistle lanyards to hasten us, all my upper body strength faltered as I struggled to contain my laughter and shimmy up the rope at the same time.

 

But the days where our racial tendencies were merely for a good neighbourly laugh have suffered a tragic demise. We have lost the openness of being able to call each other by race with a lame insult and walk home together arms across the other's shoulder with no bitterness. The loss of being able to be secure in our collective inadequacies, is to be disabled towards fortifying each other. Repeatedly, the contra-rotating seeds of suspicion and entitlement have been sown to deeply fragment our society, and create the perception of the haves and have-nots along lines where they do not exist, to blind us to the actual areas where the haves stand apart from the have-nots. Add to this tinderbox the agents of anarchy, and there we get 13 July 2015. 

With this disquieting aura veiling the passing week, I proceeded offshore on Hari Raya pertama to FSO Bunga Kertas, then to Tinggi Alpha with a final pick up from Bekok Charlie. The ship was festive, with every light on the deck, the masts, the exhaust stack and the helideck turned up to full brightness, while the rigs looked for all the world like oil lamps. The Helideck Landing Officers handed us doggie bags of my favourite goodies: lemang with serunding, saffron rice with chicken and beef rendang. In all these, were glimmers of hope.

Seligi Alpha. Should we sing, "warm smell of pelitas, rising up through the air"?

Which brings me to a bone I have to pick with a certain sector of our populace who with smug perpetuity go mantric about how in their states exist inter-religious and inter-racial harmony so unlike what we have this side of the South China Sea. We should all be careful about speaking prematurely about racial and religious harmony. What you think is a reflection of idyllic harmony is but the sheen of the sea without ripples, the dead calm of a boat that has not faced the tempest.

You cannot afford such naivety to blindside you to the fact that there is a difference between tolerance untested and integration fought for. The apparition of a breakdown in racial harmony is on the other hand the struggle for sensibility and inclusivity. Amidst what many believe to be covertly state-acquiesced flashpoints, the true face of what Malaysians are comes forth. There will be the agents of evil squared off against the people who will not see their friends clobbered streetside just on the basis of their skin colour. This pays logic to the fact that peace is not simply the absence of conflict. Indeed we are awake to the sower of weeds amongst the wheat, and we toil that the wheat never gets choked by the evil planted amongst us.



Rowan Gorilla II jack-up rig alongside FOIS Tembikai and Rescue Boat

As regards the hatemongers they are a lot who are oblivious over how the Creator will call them away from this life, and are preparing for it to be a most unsavoury farewell. Of course, the Universal Law of Depravity sees to it that a disproportionate number of evildoers live far better lives, rife with temporal reward, than the lesser numbers of field workers, who endeavour toward and pay the price for peace. Yet, I believe that the least we could do before all eventualities are summed up and concluded, is to forge goodwill, so that should grand misfortune and celestial cock-up have it that our deaths be excruciating, remarks may be passed that we deserve better.

There is no good in allowing hatemongers take centre stage, even, nay, especially if they are state-sponsored. There are none of us who should count the bloodying of a face we know not, as a victory. We are all a part of this teeming social fabric. I rather we were a tapestry than crimson bandages.

Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri, maaf zahir dan batin.