I was born in the 1960s. By some strange luck, I was educated largely in English in a public school (we didn't have an abundance of private schools then).

Those of us below 30 today had a different kind of luck. We are fluent in Bahasa Malaysia, but the majority speak and write "English horribilis ".

We were a British colony. So was Hong Kong.

We told the Brits to go home in 1957. They left Hong Kong 40 years later.

Yet once upon a time, and while Hong Kong was still a British colony, we beat the Hongkies hands down in English. And I mean we - Malays, Chinese and Indians.

We were the toast of the world. Teachers in the UK, US and Australia praised our students for the English they spoke and wrote. Back home, cabbies impressed visiting Mat Salleh tourists and businessmen. That was how good we were!

But things have changed. Today, our children speak perfect Bahasa Malaysia amongst themselves - Malays, Chinese and Indians. That's integration and it's great ... but they now speak "English horribilis ".

I ask myself how this came to be.

Look at India. The Brits were here almost as long as they were there. In the past decade, India has exported thousands of IT superstars to Silicon Valley. Bangalore and Chennai have become centres of software innovation. We're still struggling to fill our ghost-towns - Cyberjaya and MSC.

What did they do that we didn't? Or more likely, what did we do that they didn't?

The Indians realised the gift of language that their colonial masters unintentionally left behind.

We somehow found it in ourselves to forsake the gift.

Every cloud has a silver lining. For all that they took from us as our colonial masters, they could not take away the English that they made our parents learn.

Instead, we spat on it and threw it out with the bitter memories of oppression.

And it's ironic to be reminded that it was Anwar Ibrahim who, in the 1970s, led a rampage through Universiti Malaya, destroying English-language signboards.