Only Oriental Daily mentioned it 東方日報才有提到

I came across a column in Oriental Daily(東方日報) by Young Ai Ling(楊艾琳 I use onamotopeia here, as I had no idea who she is, and her picture on her column shows the writer is a woman), in Oriental Daily. She wrote about one evening, sitting in the balcony of a long-house in Sarawak, and someone in the long house turned on a radio, the sound of sape came out, like a hornbill flying pass.

The radio is a you-do-not-see-them-in-electrical-appliance-anymore kind of shortwave radio, and a small one, but it is the hope of the natives: the hope of getting out of poverty, the hope of getting education, the hope of not being evicted from their land. Each evening from 6pm to 8pm, the natives received the news from outside through shortwave radio. In the neglected region of Malaysia where there is no electricity supply, telecommunication, and internet, all long-houses turn on their shortwave radio, tune in to the same shortwave frequency during this 2 hours.

She is referring to Radio Free Sarawak station. I do not know for sure if the station actually got a license to broadcast, or otherwise. But I am pretty sure Malaysian government does not like this station.

This station is in Bahasa Malaysia(Malaysian standardized version of Malay) and dialects of Sarawakian natives, broadcast only news, and talk-show, call-ins. And all of them mostly centred around the Murum dams, how the natives are dislocated from the very land they rely on for their livelihood, and the court-cases about the native land, all the kind of issues we do not see and hear on the news aired by Astro, RTM, TV3, NTV7, 8TV, TV9. Google "Radio Free Sarawak" and you will get the website for the online edition, podcasts available for download.

It is sad that theSarawakian natives have to fight so hard for their plights to be heard, even in the age of information super-highway. Only in Malaysia. Please show your support for them, anyway you can.

A hind-sight: It is while writing this post, that I realised that the columnist did not specifily mention she was in Sarawak, but only mentioned hornbill, sape, East Malaysia, Murum. So only Sarawakians can recognise what she was writing. From my experience of living in Malay Peninsula, I am certain almost all the Peninsular Malaysians do not get her points, as they actually have a hard time understanding which part of Malaysia she was referring to. Why did she write in such an obscure manner?

A side note:
Among all the Chinese dailies I can find in Klang Valley, only Oriental Daily has a column concerning natives of Sarawak. I suspect this is due to the following 3 reasons:
1. The daily is backed by a conglomorate from Sarawak, so somehow the daily gives Sarawak just that little bit more attention.

2. The backer of daily is at odds with the man controlling Sin Chew daily and her sister dailies.
(Don't just take my word for it, just dig a little into the past: back in 2003A.D., when Oriental Daily first launched in Klang Valley, Sin Chew daily and her sister dailies fought a dirty war with Oriental Daily. Read carefully here, not dirty campaign, but dirty war, as both camps used really low and dirty tactics in the war. The camp of Sin Chew actually banned newspaper-stand and newspaper peddlars from selling Oriental Daily, among other things, the most hilarious part was both camps accused each other of burning the opponent's newspaper. Yes, Sin Chew camp won, but not without injuring herself. I could never look at those editors the same way again.)

3. The daily has a very low market penetrate rate, it is free to pick up in Jaya Jusco(Oo, sorry, now the offical name is Aeon), and other places from Monday to Friday, though some newspaper-stands and 7-11 do carry this daily, 365 days a years, available for RM1.00 per copy; so it had to be different from Sin Chew and her sister dailies.

我在東方日報看到楊艾琳的專欄:<<楊城藍井>>。（谷歌一下就看到了）
楊小姐在專欄中說到，在長屋中聴到原住民收聴電台。這電台指的是 Radio Free Sarawak（谷歌一下就看到了，可以下載），這是原住民自己辦的，有沒牌照我可不知道，原天傍晚6pm到8pm播出兩小時，內容是新聞，清談和叩應，語言用馬來西亞國語和砂朥越原住民的語言。

長屋中收聴電台用的是現今在電器店已經找不到的短波收音機。在砂朥越的內陸，還是有許多地方沒有電力廠的供電，沒電訊網絡，小小的一台短波收音機，帶給原住民的是希望：保障他們本身權益的希望。Free Sarawak的內容都是原住民設路障阻止興建沐若水壩，原住民習俗地的訴訟這些事件的最新消息，尤其是受到影響的原住民的悲情心聲，這些我們在Astro, RTM, TV3, NTV7, 8TV, TV9 的新聞中是看聴不到的。悲哀的是在網絡時代，砂朥越的原住民要這麽辛苦才能把本身的辛酸傳出去。

只在馬來西亞。

Big Corporations Are Always Arrogant In Malaysia, Because They Can

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuWxslz7-LQ&feature=related
Found the above video on youtube recently, Singaporean television news reported that KFC had issued a public statement in respond to the 2 videos below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgHSZQhP630
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4V2NmteNTM&feature=endscreen&NR=1

According to the video footage from Singaporean television news, the 2 videos showing the gross side inside the KFC kitchen in Malaysia are old videos, but resurfaced, and KFC had made it public that the personnels invovled are sacked when the videos were known the first time, and KFC had installed cameras in all the kitchens since then.

Was there ever a public statement from KFC, or just on youtube, as video response to the 2 gross-side-inside-the-KFC-kitchen videos? Because I simply cannot recall ever read about the supposed public statement, much less seen it on television news, or paid advertisement. After googling, I got a zero result about the public statement in any news from Malaysia, only the videos from youtube. So even Singaporean television news had sort of beautified this episode in KFC Malaysia, while it did report that the power of  youtube is not to be ignored.

And looking at the video response from KFC, it just shows that KFC is being arrogant, nothing else. It is such a big corporation, it can afford to be arrogant, in Malaysia.

I am just happy that I had decided to give up deep-fried foods; except the oven-fried foods I made myself; but they cannot be called deep-fried, they are oven-fried.

A side note:
丹斯里郭鹤尧 Tan Sri Kuek Ho Yao passed away on 13 Oct, 2012, aged 96.
He was an important figure in Chinese independent secondary school circle in Johor, Malaysia, just google his name and you will get a lot of newspaper posting obituaries for him online, so I am not going to write an obituary here, just wanted to say his passing away is the end of an era.

How will Malaysians reponse to Balpreet Kaur?

http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/109cnf/im_not_sure_what_to_conclude_from_this/c6bqtpd

The link above is about a young Sikh woman , Balpreet Kaur, in USA and how she responded to a photo of her, taken without her knowledge and posted online and people made fun of her appearance.  I came across news about this on Yahoo!, and it led me to this thread in Reddit.com.

This is not something that happened in Malaysia, but because the story all started with a photo of a young Sikh woman, and we have Sikhs in Malaysia too, so it made me wonder how it will turn out if we ever got a similar situation.

It the link above, Balpreet Kaur replied calmly to those who made fun of her. This is not shocking, as it shows she had a lot of inner strength to response to those people calmly, she replied wihtout fear. She actually stared down those cyberbullies without being angry.

After her reply, those who made fun of her actually read-up about Sikh, tried to understand what she had stated in her reply. Then they actually apologize, and said they all had learned something from her.

How will it turn out in Malaysia? We see people attack people on the ground of races, religions daily (the true motivation is political gain, so they can stay in power forever); those big guns from UMNO calling Malaysian Chinese, especially MCA to go back to Tang Shang (the old local name for China). In Penang, ever since 2008, when Lim took the office of Chief Minister of Penang, those people from UMNO have been throwing racial insults at him daily. Do we see anyone being charged under Sedition Act because of these? No.

And about Sikh in Malaysia, while I know there is such a group in Malaysia, I actually know very little about them, in the media, or daily life. Actually the only memory I have about them is the guards in front of banks or hotels, and that's way back in like 1970's. It is clearly they are ignored in the mainstream politics in Malaysia. So if someone from Chinese/Malay or other races, publicly made fun of a Sikh woman like this, would anyone actually care to read what she had to say? Actually, would we see any newspaper actually run a story that praise her for her eloquent, calm reply? I do not think so; it will more likely be met with more cyberbullies, and real world bullies, both in physcial from (if her location is known), and the public media. Any politician will come out to speak for her? No! Sikh votes are not sufficient to sway anything.

From the post in Reddit, to Balpreet Kaur's reply to it, and the responses followed, whatever we may think or say about those people in USA, they still have a lot of people with genuine empathy, ready to learn something new with open mind, exercise real social tolerance, and actually believe all human are created equal. From all the noises in newspaper, TV, radio, and internet, I do not see we have anything close in Malaysia. Cases in point:
1. http://www.20minutes.fr/web/1011113-femme-barbe-moquee-repond-reddit#xtor=RSS-145
(a French newspaper website posted her reply)
2. http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8539610/reddit-users-rebuked-by-sikh-woman
(Australia television news website posted her reply)
3. http://shine.yahoo.com/women-who-shine/sikh-woman-balpreet-kaur-turns-cyber-bullying-incident-203500244.html
(Yahoo!, the story that led me to the thread in Reddit.com)
I do not see her story in newspaper or TV or hear about it on Radio in Malaysia.

Her story makes me ashame to be a Malaysian.