Jaga Pintu

Okay. So I woke up this morning happily surfing The Star’s website, wanting to know what’s the latest news around the country. But my happy morning was a little spoilt after reading this piece of news “British Royal family happy with our men”.

If you have The Star newspaper with you now, try reading it and I bet it is placed in an obscure column in the paper. Surely, because it was such an embarrasing piece of news. Well, of course it’s embarassing! A freakin’ 122 personnel from the prestigious Royal Malay Regiment being flown halfway across the globe to guard some palace belonging to some royal family who couldn’t care less if Malaysia were to be bombarded by missles from some terrorists. They call it “London Public Duty”. For goodness sake, send them to Sichuan or Myanmar for some relief work, and I’ll call it a “public duty”.

If you read the news, you would have noted that the “proud” Datuk Seri Najib noted that each members of the Regiment received RM1,300 gratituous payment for their honourable “public duty”. The news conveniently omit from mentioning the cost of sending the troop there. Several sources quote the cost to be between a whopping RM 1.8 million to RM 2 million, but if anyone has a figure from a reliable source, please do tell me, but I bet it’s not cheap.

Seriously, even if it doesn’t cost a single cent, you have to agree that sending your best troops, your Royal Army to guard some other Royal family’s gate is a shame. If my memory serves me right, not long ago, some local town councils attempted to replace some of the English names of some roads and streets in Malaysia to weed out any colonial influences left in the country; a move which was definitely unnecessary and ridiculous because the names are part of our history and to remove them is to deny our history. But come on, sending the troops to guard Buckingham Palace? Doesn’t that look like kow towing to some colonial influence? Perhaps this is an elaborate scheme by “some people” to siphon some cash out of tax-payer’s money. Gosh, all the government taxes I have paid while buying McDonalds and KFC.

I have always been a proud Malaysian and I will always be a proud Malaysian. But this morning, for ten minutes of my life, I felt a tinge of embarassment to tell the world that I am a Malaysian.