THE weekend before the last Hari Raya festive season, I happened to be in Penang. With me were two mainland Chinese social activists concerned with rural poverty and migrant communities in China, who were keen to compare urban development and its impact on the poor between our two countries.

As I was touring them around some of Georgetown's best-preserved historical sites, we saw a group of Malay men and women sleeping rough just across the street from the magnificent Masjid Kapitan Keling. A few badly clad children were making fun out of the misery by playing with the matchboxes that they had picked up from the drains, the parents apparently too worn out to pay attention to them.

Curiosity got the better of me, and I went up to ask a pak cik what was going on. His answer shocked me, for they had come all the way from a small village in Kedah to camp near the mosque, awaiting the Hari Raya alms from the worshippers expected to throng the area in a few days' time.

"Bukan duit raya aje; kami akan dapat beras dan kain juga," he said in a highly expectant tone.

The old man explained further that nearly the entire congregation of his kampong's mosque had gone somewhere for the same purpose, a ritual that they performed year after year, and he blamed it on the lack of development in his home village. So much for our years of chanting Malaysia Boleh, I thought to myself.

It must have been to the dismay of Khairy Jamaluddin, the high-flying son-in-law of the prime minister, that the dozens of Malay folks that I met did not come from Penang, but Kedah, a state in the Malay heartland. I am still keen to know what would Khairy make of this irony, and why he has remained silent on the marginalised Malays despite that Umno has been in power there for donkey's years.

I suppose there are not many countries in the world where conundrums and paradoxes abound, and Malaysia has become quite a classic example in this respect. In a time and age where justice, fairness, transparency and democracy trump race and religion, we have a potentially the world's largest race-based party whose ideology is premised on the fight for the betterment of its own lot. But its word, when put under close scrutiny, often sounds like a clanging cymbal.

Winning votes

Come next Umno general assembly, there may still be one or two keris being brandished by some of the Western-educated leaders as a popular pastime. They may very well repeat the same scripts and vow to make the Malays a "glokal" race. As for me, I would prefer to skip the chest-beating contest in the hall and be enchanted by the posh cars parked neatly outside the Putra World Trade Centre. From Mercedes Benz to Beemers, they can easily steal a march on the most acclaimed car show in town. No doubt, there will always be one or two Proton cars around for patriotic decorations, but never too many. Perhaps the ability of the Umno-putras to own so many luxury cars is indicative of their "toweringness" also.

Umno politicians, whether bred locally or seasoned abroad, almost always relish in proving their religio-nationalist credentials to win votes. Today, one may see Khairy browsing books at Kinokuniya in KLCC in his best outfit, complete with the most sophisticated electronic gadgets and the trendiest nike trainers. Next day, one may chance upon the very same Khairy - in an Arafat-styled scarf - decrying US imperialism and Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians in his high-pitch voice outside the state-of-the-art KL Convention Centre.

Leadership by example. If the top leaders are mired in a split identity, what else can one expect of the low-rung Umno leaders? Hence, Zakaria Deros, a Klang municipal councillor, was daring enough to call a press conference and condemned the media and the opposition parties for picking on him, as if the whole world was conspiring against his best intention to put his entire family under one roof a very huge roof that would make many a hard-working Malaysian salivate.

There were even indignant voices at the Umno general assembly that the relentless pursuit of Zakaria by the opposition and the subsequent demolition of his (in)famous satay house was a smear campaign to humiliate the Malay race as a whole. With them around, being glokal would seem, quite literally, a millennium goal.

For Umno, there are simply too many enemies to be fought simultaneously: the Chinese, the secularists, the women religious activists, the Western hegemons, the foreign saboteur, the Jews and, depending on political necessities, the Singaporeans . And the list is not exhaustive. One must truly salute Umno for its fortitude in holding the fortress for the country while caught in a perpetual siege mentality .

Enhancing one's interests

Most recently, Najib Tun Razak, the deputy prime minister, has come up with a not so original idea that all mosques should, like the private sector, strive for business success. For the Barisan Nasional government, everything betrays its purposes and functions when it cannot be a vassal for economic gains.

This reminds me of the righteous wrath of Martin Luther, who denounced the corrupt-to-the-core Catholic Church of his time as 'scheinheilig', a German term that means 'seemingly holy'. The Reformation ensued, which arrested the degradation of a great faith and enabled the renewal and restoration of the Catholic Church.

To be fair, all the contradictions in Malaysia's socio-political life are not just within the exclusive domain of the Malays. Remember the outrage of the Chinese at the suggestion that a rotating system be adopted in Penang for the chief minister post? A community that has been crying foul over the seriously distorted affirmative action that favours first and foremost the Umno-putras and their cronies is so haunted that it has come to regard the post as an exclusive right of the Chinese. We may not necessarily be a friend of meritocracy, and much work has still to be done to that end.

Tiong Hiew King, whose flagship title Sin Chew Daily claims itself to be opposed to racial politics in Malaysia, finds it hard to conceal the home truth of having to resort to vainglorious and illusory Chinese nationalistic sentiments in order to justify his press monopoly. I shall not repeat the dirty tricks employed by Sin Chew to ensure that its rivals are kept off the stalls of the newsagents and vendors. Fair competition only applies when it does not hurt, but enhances one's immediate interests.

After I forwarded the hilarious interview by Malaysia Today to an e-group, a subscriber asked me if it was real, for it "sounds like a joke". What this person does not realise is the simple truth that, in Malaysia, joke is like reality and vice versa. Given the increasingly powerful control mechanism, it is becoming harder and harder to decipher which is which.

So, if this the Malaysia that the BN government is ready to showcase the world through much fanfare and pomp when the nation celebrates its fiftieth birthday in 2007, I am sure the tourists will be in for a lot more surprises, pleasant and unpleasant alike.