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Malaysian-born M. Bakri Musa, a California surgeon, is a columnist for Malaysiakini.com and a contributor to Malaysia-Today.net. His credits have appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review, International Herald Tribune, and Education Quarterly. His commentary has also aired on National Public Radio's Marketplace. This second volume follows the pattern of the first, Seeing Malaysia My Way, and carries the writer's commentaries from 2004 to 2007, a look at Malaysia under the leadership of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi. It is both reflective and prescriptive. Malaysia is generously blessed with many favorable attributes. Properly harnessed they would propel Malaysians to be among the develope...
The Son Has Not Returned: A Surgeon in His Native Malaysia is a memoir of a Malaysian-born and Canadian-trained surgeon's tenure in his native Malaysia from January 1976 to May 1978, and at a time when the term "brain drain" had not yet entered the popular lexicon. When he left Canada to return home, it was to be a permanent move. Alas, that was only intention; other factors soon intruded. Policymakers may expound on the dynamics of the brain drain, but in the end what makes an individual leave his country of birth is unique unto himself. To adapt Tolstoy's line, families who stay put are all the same; those who emigrate do so for their own special reasons. This is one such story. The writer...
Cast From The Herd is a cultural memoir of a young Minangkabau boy, later to become a surgeon in Silicon Valley, California, in rural Malaysia during the late 1940s to the early 60s. The Minangkabaus are the largest matriarchal society, if we include those in neighboring Indonesia. It is an account of the many seminal events, beginning with the horrors of the Japanese Occupation and the subsequent brief but equally brutal three-week reign of terror by the Chinese Communists just before the British re-established its authority immediately after the war. The two hitherto World War II allies against the Japanese became mortal enemies as each tried to gain exclusive control of Malaya, as the cou...
Bakri Musa makes a persuasive argument for Malaysia to embrace globalization with conviction. It is the ticket to her Vision 2020 aspirations. Malaysia was well on her way to join the global mainstream when the 1997 economic crisis interrupted that trajectory. It is now time, the writer passionately pleads, to return to that path. Yes there are sandbars and reefs, together with the inevitable storms and swells in the ocean of globalization. This calls for skillful navigators and sailors ready to trim the sails and batten the hatches. The alternative would be to remain in port, not an attractive option. The writer offers specific prescriptions on how best to meet those challenges, from enhanc...
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Malaysia's highly centralized and tightly controlled system of education fails in educating and integrating the young. It is also ill suited for a plural society. Instead of the present rigid and uniform system, the writer calls for one that is flexible and diverse, but with a core of commonality. There should also be private sector participation to provide competition and spur innovation. Achieving this requires radically changing the ministry of education from one obsessed with strict top-down command, to a more democratized model with power and responsibilities delegated to the periphery. The minister is less a drill sergeant barking out orders to his raw recruits but more of a symphony conductor coaxing the best out of his skilled musicians. The reforms suggested here will make Malaysians fluently bilingual in Malay and English, science literate, and mathematically competent, as well as foster a common Malaysian identity.
The Malay Dilemma Revisited is a critical and balanced analysis of Malaysia's preferential race policy and its impact on the nation's delicate race dynamics and economy. Unlike America's affirmative action, Malaysia's version is far more aggressive and pervasive and has been remarkably successful in creating a sizable and stable Bumiputra (indigenous group) middle class. The price tag is significant: distortion of freemarket dynamics and consequent inefficiency. Perversely, the policy impairs rather than strengthens Bumiputras' ability to compete. In contrast to quotas and other set-aside programs that are the hallmark of the current policy, the writer presents an alternative strategy aimed ...
The Infinite Longing for Home is a groundbreaking study of Ben Okri's and K.S. Maniam's literary problematization of 'home' in relation to subjectivity and the nation within and beyond the context of Nigeria and Malaysia. Drawing on Lacan, Zizek, Laclau and Mouffe, and weaving through history, politics, philosophy and literature, this book critically examines the motives and means by which peoples forced to live together in a country love and hate each other, and overlook the truths about themselves, their actions and beliefs. It looks into why some embrace heterogeneity and open-endedness while others are internally compelled to over-identify passionately with their religion and race, and to posit theirs as irreducibly distinct from and superior to others'. The Infinite Longing for Home also traces through Okri's and Maniam's writings a way out of today's political aporia, a path to the re-creation of a new society humbled and unified by the recognition of its participation in flawed humanity.
This book explains how to do' research on the early Malay doctors. A detailed account of the meaning of the word Malay' is given, in due recognition of the high status accorded to Malay Civilisation in the Malay annals and Chinese chronicles. Forty-three early Malay doctors were traced over nine years in Malaya and Singapore. The techniques deployed to trace them are explained. The sources of their biographies are described, which include interviews, narratives, family accounts, newspapers, publications, and contacting their former institutions, friends and associations. Only a brief one-page biography for each doctor is included in this book. There are 30 appendices that contain tabulated information about these doctors, information about the early schools, medical institutions and hospitals at the time. This book is a resource guide on the early Malay doctors based on present research findings. More research efforts need to be channelled to find the remaining 12 early Malay doctors.