The time S Thayaparan got that elusive blend down to a gem was when he fused a spot of reminiscences about the admirable conduct of a nazir agama (chief of religious affairs) he knew in the armed forces in the 1970s with critical scrutiny of a call by Umno types in 2011 for more representation for ulama in their party’s supreme council.
The piece sang from its ‘intro’ - as they say among journalists - to its conclusion with an eloquence that prompted this reviewer to recall what a famous poet said on encountering the work of another: “I wanted to go to the man that wrote it and say something.”
Unfortunately, that piece - actually, it was a letter that appeared in theSun
- is not among the compilation of articles ‘No Country for Righteous
Men’ that Thayaparan wrote during a two-year (2011-13) stint for Malaysiakini, though it was the best of a slew of missives from him that had enlivened the theSun's letters column and got him an invitation to write for the portal.Had Thayaparan’s letter praising Warrant Officer Haji Mohd Said as a multicultural exemplar been included in ‘No Country’, it would have served as useful basis to suggest why that piece was memorable while much of what has been included here is ephemeral.
The latter description, though, is no reason to resist engagement with this collection, subtitled ‘Essays in a Culture of Offendedness’, which can also be seen as a 383-page jeremiad on the evanescence in Malaysian life of what may be called the ‘pluralistic personality’, of which Mohd Said was a quintessential embodiment.
In our multiracial, multicultural and multi-religious country, the pluralistic personality approaches others to study their differences from him/herself, is willing to discover that learning comes by way of a certain humility, displays a certain hesitance to judge others too quickly, is equipped with watchfulness for possible errors in one’s own perceptions, and has a capacity for laughing at foibles that does not sour into cynicism about underlying values.
That personality, examples of which abounded in the 1960s and 1970s, spawning period of Thayaparan’s self-enriching discovery of his multifarious milieu, is almost extinct these days.
In its stead is a profusion of one-dimensional types who wall themselves away, smugly satisfied with the monisms of race or religion.
Is
it a surprise that in the latter environs, the culture of easily taken
umbrage is rife, leaving a sociopolitical commentator like Thayapayan (left), of evident distaste for this prickliness, exposed to the ire of one-dimensional partisans of our social spectrum?In this straits it helps that this former naval commander who read law while in service can dish it out as well as he takes, maybe even better.
The racial and other shibboleths he took on in his letters to The Sun were splendid cuts to the bone of the issues involved, leaving readers with the feeling that it is not good for one’s self-esteem to be in Thayaparan’s editorial cross-hairs.
Editorial miscue
It must be said, though, that an excess of the polemical strain in a writer detracts from a columnist’s craft. The latter’s job is to try to get behind the news, to understand the personalities and forces that hog it, to give a wider perspective to the events making the headlines.
The difficulty of shining a steady columnar light on newsy developments that are can spurt and twist confusingly is exacerbated by the short attention span of readers. TS Eliot captured this attention deficit disorder thus: “Readers of the Boston Evening Transcript/Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.”
In pursuit of one shift in the gusts, Thayaparan tracked Hindraf’s P Waythamoorthy (left)
in the immediate prelude to last May’s general election, an effort that
left the columnist with a sour aftertaste as the Indian rights’
exponent made a deal with the BN that was either going to be a stunning
coup or a sellout - more the latter it has now transpired.It’s easy to be wise in hindsight. But had Thayaparan been in the reporting business before graduating to column-writing, he conceivably would have been aware of the number of Hindraf’s early enthusiasts who had already left the movement to join the opposition, especially PKR.
That fact would have raised suspicion that Waythamoorthy was posturing on behalf of remnants of a NGO whose main drivers had already left to join what they felt were more effective political vehicles for the aspirations of the Indian Malaysian poor.
Hindraf, in the time that Waythamoorthy was on a theatrical fast simultaneous with a lookout for a deal with either of the two political coalitions vying for Indian support in the upcoming polls, was by early 2013 a shell of the body that had jolted the Malaysian political landscape with an impressive demonstration in Kuala Lumpur on Nov 25, 2007.
Thayaparan’s editorial miscue on Waythamoorthy was a minor blemish in an otherwise energetic and arresting engagement with the socio-political concerns of Malaysians, the heightened focus of intensive debate in web news portals, blogs and newspapers after the general election of March 2008.
This mostly “digital democracy”, as Muss Hitam (right) put it, was among the beneficial aftereffects of that political tsunami when BN lost its supermajority in Parliament.Six years on from that landscape churning event, historians and commentators may plausibly argue that there is now a pre-2008 period to modern Malaysian history and a post-2008 phase to it - seminal was the impact of the 12th general election.
In the future, scribes wishing to make sense of this bifurcation would find ‘No Country’ a useful guide. They are certain to be enlarged and even entertained by what they find.
They may not always agree with the author’s views and evaluations, but perhaps that would only encourage them to share his conviction - that the waning of the multicultural archetype in our society is a suicidal loss of our essence.
TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades now. He likes the profession because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.
‘No Country’ will be launched tomorrow.
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