46] The Deepa-Raya of My Discontent

The Deepa-Raya of my discontent
Azly Rahman
Nov 14, 05 2:56pm

As a nation, we easily forgive and forget as the festive season comes and goes. It is as if a good way to a nation’s forgetfulness is through its food.

The symbolic act of having national open houses and “not talk about politics” for a few days, weeks, or a month, numbs the human mind of the critical sensibility to pick up the momentum to protest against structural injustices committed the year before, or even decades before.

We even need a new slogan, “National Integrity Day,” just like many before – Bersih Cekap Amanah, Kepimpinan Melalui Teladan, etc - to embalm yet another of our contradictions and to create an even bigger smokescreen. Back to the culture of open houses. It is as if when one visits an open house of a community or national leader that is lavishly adorned with good food and gaiety, one gets into this “symbolic power” game of “giver-receiver of aid” and “becomes momentarily indebted to those who owns the means of providing such momentary pleasure albeit a few hours.

This is the nature of our fragile multiculturalism and the nature of patronage and patrilineal politics we have been plagued with. We all need to become a postmodern flanueur to this phenomena. We must become vigilantes of power abusers and smoke them out of their comfort zones. We must embrace this new ethics before we as a nation gets eaten up and destroyed by the noli me tangere, as Jose Rizal put it – before the social cancer gives us a massive cardiac arrest.

We must learn when to stop eating and becoming intoxicated by the niceties of small and meaningless talk during these seasons and learn to sharpen our skills of focusing on radical solutions to long-term problems.

We must learn to detach ourselves from the actions we have been taking and begin to see things in focus, so that the post-seasonal celebrations will not wear us down from pushing for those much-needed reforms Deepa-Raya of my discontent How many Deepa-Rayas and Deepa-Gong Xi Fa Chai or Kongsi-Raya permutations we celebrated that have us archive those cases of power abuses and corruption?

How many of our citizens voicing out for progressive changes have we imprisoned without trial and have them “eat cake in prison” as we gobble up the rendang, the ketupat, the chicken tikka and massala, and guggle up those air sirap bandung and those cans of soda, and next blast our living rooms with those Deepa-Raya songs

How many cases of corruption at the ministerial levels will we continue to sweep under the carpet, as clean as we sweep our carpets the night before we have our open houses? How many university students and lecturers are we witch-hunting this year as we perform ceremonies of exorcizing witches, ghosts and evil spirits as we approach the days of “victory against the forces of Evil” in the symbolic acts of lighting candles or “berhari raya”.

We have forgotten that we still continue to produce Hantu Rayas in the form of big-time power/high-flying abusers and corrupt to the core businessmen, politicians, and academic leaders whose wish is to maintain power so that they many continue to have the means to have those yearly open houses.

We have unconsciously used these celebrations as opiate of the masses. We have used this aspect of culture to strengthen the culture of national-psychological abuse whose structural violence we can no longer see nor visualize. Our ideal Deepa-Raya gift

We will have a real celebration when we are able to do some of the following for our nation:

• Stop the witch-hunt in our public universities and start ranking our public universities based on the degree they champion intellectual and academic freedom.

• Stop thinking that a post in politics is a ticket to fortune and one can build political empires based on one’s birthright.

• Stop appointing university leaders who are interested in their own personal and political glory.

• Stop designing economic programmes that are race-based and start thinking of addressing class issues that cuts across ethnicity.

• Stop the double-talk on corruption and abuse of powers.

• Begin a revamp of all aspects of out educational system so that we will create a thinking citizenry.

• Begin a systematic restructuring of our university core foundation classes so that we may produce graduates well-versed in the culture and history of the development of ideas.

• Begin educating our children of the cancerous nature of corruption and how our political-economic system is plagued with this ailment.

• Begin teaching our children to speak up for their rights as individuals and to learn to be suspicious/vigilant of our elected representatives.

• Begin a systematic programme of teaching “democracy in the classroom” through a radical re-interpretation of teaching strategies that are friendly to the development of the human mind.

• Begin analyzing how our local corporate-national media works and how the human mind will be further controlled through the interlocking-directorateship and controlling interest of the media.

• Begin an intensive campaign to vote progressive political parties into power – ones that have a very good track record in exposing corrupt practices and not ones that continue to be more and more corrupted or protect those that are aging and corrupting.

• Begin to educate the younger generation of the need to turn this nation into one that is ethical, based on its functioning as a political-economic entity that values a developmentalist paradigm that meets human need rather that satisfies human greed.

"What then must we do?"

A theory of progressive change requires the development of thesis-antithesis to produce a synthesis of ethical changes and the cycle must be allowed to proceed naturally, guide by altruism.

This process must be aided by our willingness as a “multiculturally-driven sovereign nation” with a good “general will” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau would say, until the revolution in our mind continues - until we arrive at a utopia of an ethical republic governed by transcultural philosophy. Until then, let us not have them force us to eat cake.