OCT 11 — Some of you wanted to be firefighters. Others wanted to be policemen. The more starry-eyed dreamt of being astronauts while the truly depraved already knew they would be lawyers. Not me. When I was a kid, all I wanted to be was the prime minister of Malaysia.
You can hardly blame a young ’un, can you? In-between watching bouts of Ultraman vanquishing whatever scaly, slimy lizard that crawled out of the gutter, the shuttered television set flashed scenes of a flash-looking Mahathir stepping out of planes, waving all regal-like to a huge welcoming party that even included a brass band. And it happened no matter where he went.
That, I told myself, was the life.
So when a friend of the family asked my five-year-old ass what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered in an instant: “I wanna be prime minister”.
She laughed and laughed when I said that, which made me want to smack her one.
“Why would you want to do that?” she prodded, in between sniggers. Which made me want to smack her even more.
Well, I reasoned, all he does is fly around the world and shake hands. That can’t be very hard, can it?
But what truly doused this flaming political ambition and possibly rescued you, the rest of Malaysia, from the terror of my Hitler-ite regime was my mother saying “Soh chai, you’re Chinese; you can’t be the prime minister.”
What? Damn. Now I have to find work in advertising instead.
In my adult life, I can see how my mother was so very wrong. I can be prime minister; Mahathir himself said so. Not me specifically, but a Chinaman like me. And although I know now that it involves a little bit more than jet-setting and hand-shaking, it still doesn’t look like it’s a very hard job.
The biggest extra responsibility so far seems to be sloganeering. And the best part is you don’t even have to make sense.
In fact, the more pedantic you are, the less the opposition is able to discredit you and your slogan.
So If I were prime minister, I’d introduce “42 Malaysia: Eat more fish. Floss regularly” Why? Well, because it’s the best I can think of.
Besides, fish is culturally neutral, so I won’t be offending any of the major religions and races. Not like a cow or a pig (which would be rolled out only when I became dictator for life). Flossing, well, that’s self explanatory; you should always make flossing a habit.
By being vaguely beneficial, no one can say that I was malevolent by pushing it on the masses. And whatever other holes in the concept there may be, I see that they can be masked by making people write songs and create big huge logos about “42 Malaysia”.
Beyond that, I can’t really tell what else prime ministers are supposed to do. The country’s 52 years old now, for goodness sake, does it still expect to be led around like a toddler? Whatever policy that needs making ought to have been made by now, else it can’t be very important.
Which then just leaves the jet-setting and hand-shaking, of which I see there is a lot.
Anyway, I’m all grown up now so I no longer entertain silly ideas of being prime minister, regardless of how easy it looks to be. That was a childhood ambition so cruelly killed by the ill-informed and prejudiced. And we should always leave the fleeting dreams of youth where we left them.
No, no more of that drivel. I’m a big boy now. I know better. I don’t want to be prime minister. Not anymore.
Nowadays, I’d much rather be Ultraman.
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