I thank Neil Khor for his lengthy comment on my letter which touched on the letter by Benjamin Tan . Let me assure Khor, Tan and the rest that it is also my wish to see the emergence of a truly Bangsa Malaysia without, other than for religious considerations, any hang-ups among ourselves.

Sadly and thanks to Umno's great failure in providing the right leadership, we now see much greater social and economic divides, especially within the Malay community itself. Forget the great failure in achieving the 30 percent equity in the corporate sector.

Just ask any man in the street who lives in better houses, drive better cars, fly first and business class (with own money), etc. As for jobs with the government, I wonder why the non-Malays want them anyway. Once they have done their compulsory service, even Malay doctors and consultants will leave while the non-Malays tend to move abroad.

Still, I could point out several director-generals of department (meteorology and civil aviation for instance) as well as senior people in judiciary, etc, who are non-Malays.

My worry is that in our attempt to bring about a Bangsa Malaysia, we have not even made the first start i.e. that Bahasa Melayu should be our common lingua franca. A good Bahasa Melayu I mean, not bahasa pasar. Surely we can all see this in Thailand and Indonesia and the Philippines. Mind you even that native Thais, native Indonesians and native Filipinos are still far from happy because they know the ethnic Chinese are still controlling their economies and many a time their own leaders are in the pockets of these Chinese tycoons.

And Khor and Tan can see for themselves that, thanks to Dong Jiao Zong etc, the Chinese in Malaysia seem to be determined to push ahead to maintain Mandarin as one of the main languages in this country. Ironically, they are achieving this with the connivance of the government-owned TV1 and TV2 and the Umno-owned TV3, TV8, NTV7 and soon to revived TV9.

Let's be honest about this. Can anybody tell me how many minutes of TV programmes (including commercials, video clips, etc) are in Bahasa and how many are in Mandarin or Cantonese? As a Malaysian, I am ashamed to see that Bahasa Melayu still remains a 'subtitle language', and very often the words, the sentences and syntax are quite disgraceful.

This does not include those billboards, hoardings and posters that we see everywhere. And mind you, the four Chinese dailies are not showing any signs of a declining circulation.

I am sure Khor and Tan too, are not too happy about this.