MERDEKA!

Today is the Independence Day for Malaysia and I spent the night at the Museum along with 120 school kids and the museum staff of the Museum Gallery Tuanku Fauziah, MGTF. It was a tiring event for this getting old body but a very lively one to be there at the same time, it brought back memories of having spent over twelve years hanging out with the staff doing my own thing in creativity. I was able to sit and had a good chat with agroup four Indian kids and a Chinese school teacher about Art and mostly about how to face life as a journey of self discovery. Although just bare fifteen years of age except for the Chinese teacher, they were very attentive and I was able to make the connection with them. These are the future generation of Malaysians who will make or break the country further just as the present generation is doing and as such I feel it important to share as much as I can of what i have experienced in my life.

While in the middle of my chat with the group and old friend came by the Museum, he was the former Director of the Museum and a professor at the University, (USM). Hasnol is an enigma in my relationship with others as he can be overly self centered and likes to dominate over others like he is the man with all the answers. He came by also to meet with the wood carving artist whose solo exhibition was on in the gallery. I had qualms about writing about him here as I know he will not come out as the ideal friend to have by a long shot, but it has to made open as he played and still does an important role in my life as far as friendship goes. To me Hasnol is an opportunist who saw the light while he was running the Museum and gallery at USM and he took hold of this opportunity and paved his own way towards self serving and self aggrandizement at the expense of others regardless of who the are. He likes to take charge and run th show in any and every conversation that i was with him and he will blatantly try to shut me down from offering any view when in a group. Last evening proved to be exactly as i had expected, but i slammed him aside every time he tried to drown me and proceeded with a louder voice and intensity to let myself b heard while addressing the Artists present. To avoid going into too much details, suffice to say that to me Hasnol is another typical Malay intellectual who is a little more advanced in his ways because he has been able to adapt to the Western ways better than most. He is 'slick' as they say in the west; a smooth operator with a  self serving streak, sad to say who uses others for his purposes. I like him for his intelligence and diligence when it comes to doing his work.

Again the details of our daily life as we expose ourselves to others and allow them to expose themselves to us, these are episodes and moments that one has to sit through in order to better look at ourselves, people we encounter with are our mirrors, they reflect who we are and with my friend perhaps I am looking at myself. Anyway on this Day of Independence I feel that after 61 years of living as an independent nation the country is still is the grips of colonialism, an economic one that is holding us in s bind despite having the potential to become a very rich and developed nation. Personally i feel i am still struggling with my own personal independence from my dual thinking mind, a mind that is so preconditioned from the beginning that it has belief in itself and struggling to sabotage its own integrity and confidence. My battle for freedom is within me ans it is an ongoing battle that will never end, or so it seems.