Kopi Talk with MHO

OUR FEAR YESTERDAY A REALITY TODAY

“Brunei prays for Y2K problems to stay away”.

I almost fell off my seat laughing when this headline appears among thousand other search results as I 'googled' for information on how Brunei deals with the threat posed by Y2K (millennium) bug to our computer system and our information technology 15 years ago.

The Y2K bug was supposed to hit the world computer system as we enter the new millennium and reduce all technology to a smouldering puddle that will leave the entire planet in chaos.

The information I was looking for was on how much Brunei spent on mitigating the impact of the hyped-up millennium doom-and-gloom scenarios. And of all things this result “Brunei prays for Y2K problems to stay away”, appears among many other titles.

So I laughed not because of the headline but because it's amusing, or rather my computer or Professor Google is trying to amuse me.

You see I am supposed to share the following article which was published in Borneo Bulletin's Weekend edition Kopi Talk Shop column. It was about our national identity and our concern as a community on how it came under threat as the nation marches towards globalisation with the rest of the world. Nothing to do with how much money we spent on dealing with the Y2K threat.
 

So here we go. I’ll just stick to the issue of national identity.

We’ll just leave the issue on how much money was spent on hardware and software to fix the problem when in the end nothing came out of it. The world that was supposed to come to an end is still here.

 
We are still here happily computing, surfing the internet, ‘Facebooking’, ‘WhatApping’, video conferencing and so on. But what remains is the same issue of globalisation and its threat to the national identity, culture and tradition.

The difference is, ‘our fear yesterday is a reality today’.  

15 years ago...  

BRUNEI ‘BELACAN’ FACTOR

We in Brunei marked our 16^th national Day anniversary this year with a theme focussing on national identity and the need to strengthen it.

It was fitting indeed as our National Day anniversary this year came at the start of the new millennium that is supposed to bring along a glut of great challenges and opportunities.

In this new era, the so called globalisation process driven by the rapid evolution of information technology (IT) is slowly stripping down the geographical boundaries and merging different nations into a borderless global village.

Information technology is revolutionising the way we do business, the way we trade, invest and interact with each other.

But with this rush of the so-called IT era sweeping the world, we are also witnessing a revolutionary change in our way of thinking, our mindset for better or for worse.

Never mind all the good things that can happen to us as a result of this rapid IT development and the globalisation process, what clearly worries us and our leaders is all the adverse effects these can have on our community.

We are not just talking about what damages IT and globalisation can do to our business sector. These can actually be addressed effectively by making some monetary adjustments. 

But what worries our nation is the adverse influence of IT on our society.

IT development is not only transcending geographical boundaries but it can also strip down the social fabric, erode cultural and religious values of a community.

This is already happening in many developed and developing countries.   

Brunei is at the crossroads and the path we are taking leads us towards the mainstream of globalisation process. So for us in Brunei, as we continue with our march into the new millennium, we must not allow ourselves to stray from our spiritual, cultural and social values and our national identity.

However, to uphold and strengthen our national identity as Bruneians, we also need to understand what it means to be a Bruneian.

But unfortunately, in today’s modern environment, the younger generation in particular tends to mistakenly identify itself with other alien cultures and values.

Even some families have misplaced their family prides. Misplaced in a sense that they have were overzealously proud of their adoption of alien values dictated by this materialistic world.

As one of my friends at an interesting session of our Coffee Shop Parliament the other day observed that some Bruneians, it seems, have lost their real identity as Bruneian Malays.

He said in an era where life begins with ‘e’ – e-commerce, e-style, e-prayer and so on – we are slowly witnessing the erosion of self-esteem and identity as Bruneians among our younger generations.

“Susah…susah… udang sudah jadi belacan! (it’s very sad the prawn is now only a paste),” he lamented, referring to how some people have lost their self-esteem and identity in this IT rush.

He said an ‘udang’ will always be an ‘udang’ no matter what one did to it, except when it is pounded and reduced to ‘belacan’.

“We can fry it, and yet it will be called a fried prawn, or we can make a curry out of it, and yet it will be called a prawn curry. So you see my point, the identity of the prawn is only lost when we make a ‘belacan’ out of it,” he added.

Although everyone laughed at the analogue, his message hit home. Everyone agreed that it is indeed important to do something now to ensure that the Bruneians don’t become ‘belacan’ like the ‘udang’.

The other day I became witness – or to be more precise an ‘e-witness’ – to our young people or ‘e-community’ e-chatting over in a ‘virtual chat room’ at a site on our information superhighway.

They were chatting satirically about what it means to be Bruneian. Their definition or rather their perception was provocatively revealing in a sense that their positive views on what it takes to be a Bruneian leave much to be desired of.

If their aim is to make sure the Bruneians erased all the negative traits that distinguish us from the other nationalities, then they deserve all the plaudits.

At first I found their 100-points list of what defined a true-blood Bruneian rather ludicrous. But on second thought I believed that we should make use of it as a reflection on ourselves and try to mend our ways.

Here are some of the characteristics of a true Bruneian I found on the list: 

• Your stomach growls when you don’t eat rice for a day
• You talk at the movies
• You carry a 16-oz jar of ‘sambal’ to wherever you travel
• You think other Asian countries are poorer than yours
• Your local McDonald’s serves rice and sambal
• You’ve tried passing Malaysian coins in a vending machine or pay phones
  
• You’ve smuggled electronics, CDs and porn into Brunei
• You do your shopping in Singapore, United Kingdom and Miri
• You realised that money is everything before you were six
  
• You think the Liga Perdana is equal to Super Bowl
• You talk loud thinking everybody is deaf but actually YOU are
• Your clothing has brand names printed on it that are visible from 50 feet away
• You’ve paid more than $100 to get your own private car license plate
• Sago (ambuyat) is your staple food and it is a necessity to have loads of it even       when staying overseas
• You act like a rich tycoons in Miri even if your average income is below $1000
• You furnish your home luxuriously even if it means eating rice and ‘kicap’ (soya sauce)
  for the last 2 1/2 weeks begore end of the month
• 'Hutang’ (debt) is your best friend
• You make sure that everything you consume at home is halal but eat everything else  when you are overseas.

If the way they identify their countrymen is anything to go by, we can expect the future generation to end up in worse than ‘belacan’.