My name is Gana

  As the medium of teaching was in English, schools decided to have     Malay classes to prepare students to be conversant in Malay for the impending change of the medium of instruction in schools to Malay. When Malay was introduced initially it was taught part-time as an afterthought in English schools. Neither the teachers nor the students realised that English would be replaced with Malay as the medium of instruction very soon.The Government introduced a scheme to assist senior officers to learn the language by providing an allowance of RM50/= to engage a Malay teacher. I was given a list of teachers that I could select. I selected one that was near my home to save travel costs.   On the first day I joined the class, I was introduced to three other civil servants who had come for the same purpose. To test the    level of competency of each student, he said he would conduct oral exams and invited each of us separately to an adjoining room. And so each of ...

  When we were young, we used to indulge in a game known as “hide and seek.” One member of the group would be the policeman who would close his eyes and the rest of us would go into hiding. He would count up to 100 before he set out to find the rest who would have gone into hiding. Initially we were innocent and used to hide within the kampong boundaries.  Overtime we became cheeky and used to leave the kampong and spend our time in the towns making it impossible for the “policeman” to locate us. One of the young men in our neighbouring kampong was short of stature and used to pass through our kampong after a hard day’s work. We used to shout “pendek” when we spotted him and go into hiding. We realised we had found a new game and would wait for the short man to pass through the kampong. We would shout “pendek” (meaning shorty in Malay) every time he passed our kampong. He would jump out of his bicycle, park it on the kerb of the road and look for the young boys who called him ...

  We had in our employ a blind telephone operator.   The Ministry of Human Resource had been requested to find employment opportunities for the handicapped. Our blind telephone operator was a result of their initiatives. We had no confidence in placing him in other occupations like clerks as    we felt his disability would pose difficulties for him to carry out clerical duties that required movement of physical files.  However as time went on we    discovered he    had other skills besides operating the switchboard. For one he had a formidable memory. He could remember file numbers, telephone numbers, names of callers and such with relative ease. Even when the file searcher could not locate a file, the telephone operator could remember who was the last person who handled the file and direct the file searcher to that person’s table and sure enough the file would be found among the bundle of files on his table. Despite his disability, his skill...

My paternal grandparents moved from a village near the town of Palani in India to a village in Natal, a province in    Durban, South Africa where a number of villagers from their village had settled down to work in the gold mines. There was a famine in South India which saw the migration of a large number of South Indians to Durban where there was promise of good rewards working in gold mines in Durban.  My paternal grandparents were working on a small parcel of land in Palani, India which supported a large number of extended family members. I remember my father telling me his house in Palani was near a large prison. His parents joined the exodus of Indians to Durban to seek their fortunes in the new land. My father was born in Durban. When Ghandi    the charismatic leader of Indians in South Africa decided to return to India, my paternal grandparents too decided to return to Palani in India. So with three sons in tow they returned to India. The family land was ...

The Labour Department had jurisdiction over visitors and guests who wished to enter the country. They had separate entrances for vehicles and pedestrians. Vehicles that wished to enter the country needed to have clearance from the Immigration Department. They usually had to pay a small fee at the Immigration Office before they reached the gates to access    the roads leading out to the main roads to    head north of the country. The officers were unhappy to see    drivers carelessly discarding refuse like empty cigarette boxes just outside the gates. They decided to leave wicker baskets for ease of lorry drivers to drop their refuse with signboards warning that dropping of refuse indiscriminately would attract prosecution punishable under the laws of the Department.  There used to be thousands of lorries passing through the gates and over time drivers used to throw cash and loose change as they were not legal tender once they crossed the border. Over t...

During my service as a Labour Officer in Alor Setar, I encountered the complex problem of Kaki Bukit. Kaki Bukit is a small town at the foothills of the border between Thailand and Malaysia. There is a small stretch of land between these borders which is commonly known as “No man’s land”. This is the route the smugglers used to bring in smuggled loot. The smugglers are usually pillion riders who pay a small fee to be passed to the border patrols on both states to enable them to carry out smuggling activities unhindered. From the Malaysian side one can access this land by going through hills and caves.  On this piece of land some entrepreneurs had planted rubber trees. They engaged Thai and Malaysian workers to tap the produce. As it was in no man’s land, it appeared that the labour laws of both countries did not apply. Employees there were thus exploited to the fullest. They lived in temporary shacks erected by their employers and provided with sparse meals and illicit drinks inste...