Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on December 11, 2017 - December 17, 2017

Will you still need me
Will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four?
— Lennon McCartney


I turned 60 last week. The big 60, when everyone calls you Uncle and you are officially in the “elderly” segment of society. There’s something about getting old — age stealthily creeps up on you and suddenly, wham! You’re 60! Combing my thinning hair that day, I wondered where my youth had gone, and I realised that the maxim “Been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt too” is all too real. I have already experienced much of what life has to offer, and I am thankful.

A much younger friend wrote to wish me happy birthday. “Joyeux Anniversaire, Mon Ami,” she wrote, and then added, “What would be your birthday wish this year?” A simple, heartfelt yet loaded question.

What would I wish for this time? Universal brotherhood and world peace (again)? To cruise the seven oceans and explore exotic ports of call? To be able to see what the future holds?

I thought about it, and wondered aloud what if we somehow had the ability to time travel, what would a person from 1957 see in 2017, and would the world be as he had imagined the future to be, and would he actually see the things he would have wished for?

Thrust forward some 60 years, and he would be awestruck by a world filled with baffling technological wonders. He would see streets and highways jammed with cars, trucks and buses. In Kuala Lumpur, immense skyscrapers would line the horizon, and bright neon lights would fill the night.

The 1957 traveller would grope his way through a strange new environment, filled with appliances powered by electricity: rare 1950s luxuries like radios and televisions would be everywhere, emanating musical sounds and moving images. At home, refrigerators would keep his drinks cold, and portable computers would connect him to everyone and everything, and much more. A massive new supermarket would replace his small village grocer, offering an array of technologically enhanced foods, such as instant coffee and frozen vegetables.

Life itself would be dramatically extended. He would note that many once-fatal illnesses could be prevented with an injection or cured with a pill. The newness of the time traveller’s physical surroundings — the speed and power of everyday machines — would be profoundly disorienting.

But the longer he stays in 2017, the more he would become aware of subtler dimensions of change. Once the glare of technology has dimmed, he would begin to notice society’s changed norms and values, and he would wonder if these changes are actually for the better.

If he were an early office worker, he would find a new dress code and new work rules. He would see office workers dressed like folks relaxing on a weekend, wearing informal jeans and open neck shirts, and be shocked to learn that some of them occupy positions of authority.

His ethnic jokes would fall embarrassingly flat and his smoking would get him banished to the parking lot. People would seem to be always working and yet never working where they are supposed to. Cafes would be full of people talking business and they would seem career-conscious, yet fickle. Doesn’t anybody stay with a company more than three years?

He would also be baffled by societal change. Towering billboards would introduce him to a new gentry: the celebrity artists, and a new way to live in the form of residential estates, and they would look like something out of a Flash Gordon comic book. No, siree! No more villages and small towns now.

The rise of the political class and their influence on the masses would not be new to him. It was there during the Fifties — it is just more pronounced now. He would probably wonder, as he did during the days preceding our nation’s birth, would keeping the status quo be wise or would electing a new order be what Malaysia (then Malaya) needs in order to evolve and take its place in the pantheon of great nations? The system and the players are new, yet the choices would seem surprisingly familiar to the time traveller.

Really, back in 2017, what would I wish for?

Simple as this list may be, I would like to see a stop to wasteful public spending, an improvement to the general quality of management in both the private and public domain, and yes, a clampdown on bad leadership. I am horrified by the partisan nature that has cloaked our current Malaysian leadership! They seem to think in black and white with no grey in between. We need to flush that notion down our new, improved 2017 sewage system.

Readers, we are in that strange interregnum where the old order is being challenged and the new order is still trying to find form. Like all other epochal transformation, this one is fraught with challenges and difficulties. The rise of a new economic and social order is a double-edged sword. It unleashes incredible energies, pointing the way towards new paths for unprecedented growth and prosperity, but it also causes tremendous hardship and inequality along the way.

As a nation, we are in a painful and dangerous process, and one that is full of unknowns. A new order is slowly but surely taking shape, but it is still confined within the brittle carapace of the old, with all the outmoded, unsustainable ways of life that went along with it. So, be careful what you wish for, as someone once said, you just might get it.

Personally, I am glad to be able to live one more year and I hope to be alive to celebrate my next birthday. The numbers will keep increasing, so let the candles cover my cake. I hope to keep healthy and strong. I don’t expect to climb hills without wheezing or run like a spring chicken. However a little spring in my walk now and then would be good.

I don’t expect my memory to be fantastic. I may forget what happened 25 years ago but I pray I will remember the good times and those that contributed to them. Though gravity will make frowning easier, I pray I can smile and still tell a good Dad joke or two.

Happy New Year fellow Malaysians, and here’s wishing for a prosperous 2018.


Zakie Shariff sits on the board of two local universities and has a deep interest in developing strong corporate leaders

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