Helping the Malays in my country is a big and somewhat controversial topic. 70% of our population are Malays so like it or not, we can’t run away from the Malays. Since Malaysia gained independence, we have policies developed to ensure that the Malays are not sidelined, be it in education, doing business or simply, living life as they are mostly among the lowest income bracket too. However, because of the ever-ready help for the Malays, they have somehow become complacent and what other races always think of us Malays – lazy. So the current PM wanted to remove some of the policies and obviously he has just lost some popularity because of that. But I totally agree with his action, sometimes you have to make it difficult for them to get what they need, only then they will work hard for it.
I have no stats with me right now and I only have 10 minutes to blog today as I want to prepare Gordon Ramsay’s scrambled egg before we bring Aariz to his Little Gym class this morning. Will try to do it later or in the next few days.
I started off my entry today about Malays because I was disturbed by an observation made by my colleague a few days ago. A not-so-nice picture of a Malay celebrity was leaked on the internet and it went viral. I shall not say her name here because my blog is linked to the search engine and I don’t want unnecessary remarks/comments but if you pay attention closely to the local news, you would have guessed. Yes, it appeared even on the news. Really baffled by the quality of our news until today.
Anyway, the picture got the netizens’ attention. The Malays mostly talk about it on the social media; commented on the celebrity’s Instagram, twitted on Twitter. Google trends shows that her popularity spiked significantly (see below).
What disturbed me was that, she got more than 20,000 comments in just 1 post after people knew about her action, which they hated it so much. For someone with 3m followers, more than 20,000 comments in 1 post is just an outlier. There were a mixture of negative and positive comments but mostly negative. People are willing to throw their heart out giving advice to this celebrity telling her what to do and what not to do, some giving commented on other people’s comment when they agree/disagree.
I mean, really guys? Don’t you have better things to do? I didn’t read the comments obviously, I just browsed through because I was just appalled by the whole situation. This is what we call mindshare. And this just shows what’s the mindshare of our people. It’s just sad. The mentality is still very low. How can we help the Malays when they prefer to spend their time talking about other people when they should be working hard to help themselves and improving their lives?
Dayana Omar 