The Land I Called Home

I recently read a post titled "An Impassioned Patriot" by Marina Mahathir. There, she posted a very interesting essay written by an Iranian living in France. Marjane Satrapi who did the wonderful graphic novel Persepolis. There the latter said "If you leave your homeland, you can live anywhere, but I refuse to die anywhere else than Iran -or else my life will have had no meaning"

I dreamt of leaving Malaysia when I was small. Sometimes, I just felt like going away from my homeland. I got my chance in 2007 and I took it with the hope of never having to return again. Oh, how I was wrong. The first few months living abroad taught me one very important lesson: Home is where your heart is. I can live anywhere, be it Cardiff, New York, Berlin or Tokyo, there will never be a place like Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia. The uniqueness of our culture, a one of its kind is simply a joy to the eyes.

I have been fortunate enough to travel to quite a number of countries over the 2 years living abroad with the likes of Spain, France, Ireland, and Egypt. And after doing a careful and intensive views while I was there, Malaysia is still the one place that I will return to. There is nowhere in the world that provides 24-hour food stall, where most of the food you can eat anytime. For example, the restaurant in Cardiff that I usually go to for a briyani only opens around 5pm and closes at approximately midnight of 1am if it's on weekend. While the reason is to cut cost, it represents the stereotypicality of their mindset. Their mindset is that they will have English breakfast, a sandwich or toast for lunch, steak or briyani for dinner and kebabs/doners for supper. No one restaurant can sell food for more than 2 meal periods. A small cafe selling English breakfast will be in service from 8am till 12pm, a restaurant around lunch will be open from around 12pm till 2 or 3pm. And dinner restaurants will be open from 5pm till midnight.

Looking at these different set of time allocated for different type of meals shows they lack the credibility to produce a number of food for different meal types. Unlike us, we have everything under one room -mamak. If you need anything, they have it. I am a food lover, and I eat almost everything edible (provided that they're halal la). So these are the little things that made us proud of who we are.

We are of different race, yes.
We are of different culture, yes.
We are of different religion, yes.
We are of different ideology, yes.
But we are all the same, Malaysians.

If only Malaysia is well-protected by its governors (unlike ours), Malaysia can be at least on par with the world's superpower countries. I can't write articles or journals that will be published and used for reference by professionals or academicians but my writing comes from my heart and now, my heart is hurting because the land I called my home is not being taken care of by those responsible.

p/s: Check the original post by Marina Mahathir
(http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/2009/07/impassioned-patriot.html)