Who Is The Pendatang?

It looks like our favourite pendatang is back with no apologies.

Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen. We are ALL pendatang from some place or another, starting from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

But first things first.

Someone check his legal papers to make sure there's no haram behind the pendatang. If so, we might need to engage in some deportation.

If not, we may need to give him a bit of education - something he is evidently lacking, hardly surprising since he belongs to UMNO.

But before I begin, perhaps I'd like to point out to everyone, that we all came into this world with nothing and we will all leave with nothing.

I believe that nothing actually belongs to us - we're merely temporary custodians of whatever we own, be it land or property. So I really don't see what the fuss is to establish who settled down first in this part of the planet.

And interestingly, the Shanghai Fish (who doesn't come from China) points out that for all the racial classification we do, Malaysia has never had a 'malay' Prime Minister since independence.

China and India have the two biggest populations in the whole of Asia. Ever so often, the two nations get a little crowded. So their citizens (or rather, inhabitants) cheerfully pack up their bags and find a new place to stay.

If you observe closely, the Indians and Chinese are crawling all over the world, in almost every city in every country, in every continent - like a nasty rash. :) Old habits are hard to break.

So, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Malaya, being smack in between those two countries, and strategically on the ocean trade route, would be a place where both Indian and Chinese merchants would meet.

Both originating from very highly populated countries, it also isn't a tall order that they would notice the beauty of Malaya and decide to call it home. In fact, the very word 'Malaya' has its roots in India.

I'd expect the Chinese settled down in the East Coast of Peninsular Malaya and the Indians on the West Coast. The East Coast and West Coast are separated by the Titiwangsa range, but I'm fairly certain the Chinese and Indians would have gone over to explore "the other side".

This is where the trouble starts. I hate to break it to you, ladies, but we're going to have to shoulder the blame for this one, because this is probably what happened.

A nice, well-brought-up but unconventional Indian girl would have probably wandered a little too far off from her Indian village and into a neighbouring Chinese one.

She'd have hidden behind a tree and watched a Chinese man cut down a tree, all the while noticing the outline of his muscular chest, unhidden by hair and his skin light in colour. She'd have muttered, "DAMN!!!"

Similarly, a nice, well-brought-up but unconventional Chinese girl may have observed an Indian man at work, admired his hairy chest and his deep tan, all the while whispering, "DAMN!!!"

Now when a woman has made up her mind, it is next to impossible to try and change it. So the rest, as they say, is history.

And the moral of the story is, men should have been prohibited from walking around without a shirt on. But it's obviously too late to argue over that now.

I realise I have gone off-tangent (and that's nothing new, of course), but what I was trying to say, is that Malays are essentially a cross-product of the Chinese and Indians, because frankly, the whole of South East Asia is.

Forget Malaysia. Indonesia obviously has its roots very deeply entrenched in India, even if you look beyond the superficiality of its name. When I'm at the airport, I still get confused between India and Indonesia. IND or INA?

And the currency? You'd think they'd get a little original. But nope, the 'rupee' became 'rupiah'.

The Indonesians seem to be proud of their Indian heritage - Bali has been so well-preserved. Very fascinating, since Indonesians are actually more Chinese than Indian, as the Bugis are the product of intermarriage between the Chinese and the Arabs!

The nephew of Daeng Kemboja was appointed the First Sultan of Selangor. That makes the entire Selangor Sultanate part Arab, part Chinese! Let's not get into the other Sultanates - Perak, Kelantan and Johor.

Like Shanghai Fish says, history is determined by the lessons taught within a civil society, pre-determined by a select few so-called "scholars".

If it is repeatedly fed to us, it will be interpreted as the gospel truth. If unchecked, this can lead to a total distortion of historical facts and if when a lie is spun too often, we tend to actually believe it as the truth.

Like poor little Ahmad Ismail, who lives in denial.