Question: Why did Cecil Rajendra cross the road? Answer: To get to the other side.

First, the classic chicken question. Should the poet have crossed the road? To the chic- maruah fixed on not crossing, his action is seditious as it incites other chickens to cross the road. Ouch, what would scared little chickens do if loads of other chickens cross the road?

I believe all chickens are equal. So I do need to cross the road - to look for other deprived chickens and to evaluate the rights and wrongs of the affirmative actions that favour me over other poor chickens.

I cross the road to humble myself - although they say I deserve more food than other chickens, I must be open to other poor chickens' criticisms of the theory and practice of this food redistribution system.

Affirmative action is necessary, but in both theory and practice, like most social policies, it is not entirely problem-free. Why should I feel sungguh terhina (very insulted) just because a critic says that the system which protects my interests has its flaws, fallacies and errors?

Secondly, to the poem's fiercest critics, please do not read a poem like it is a DIY manual. Have you tried asking, why purple - that curious artistic choice, a bargain between blue and red, a mix well-blended? More importantly, do you adequately understand the term indigenous?

Mr Rajendra's poem hurts because it abandons our perception of a Malaysia filled with bumiputras and non-bumiputras, and the normal self-centered squabbles that come with it, by replacing the dichotomy with indigenous and immigrants.

To me, the poem highlights the plight of the Orang Asli and fires the elitist usurpers who continue to marginalise the former, as they profit from self-created policies and laws. Its theme is not on the suffering of the peasant Malays, the agenda of other immigrant groups or the stereotyped lazy native; so if these are your issues, please, save it for other occasions.

So, why are the Orang Asli indigenous and not the Malays? The Malays are natives - but culturally, they are not indigenous. In a homeland, there are always the First Native, who may well be victims of other oppressors, and the Second Native i.e. the indigenous peoples.

What makes a native indigenous? A native is indigenous if he/she is an existing descendant of the peoples who inhabited the present territory of a country, wholly or partially at a time when persons of a different culture or ethnic group arrived there from other parts of the world, overcame them by conquest, settlement or other means and reduced them to a non-dominant or colonial situation.

An indigenous group lives in more conformity with its particular social, economic and cultural customs and traditions than the institutions of the State of which it now forms a part. They are truly a marginalised people.

They are a country's first known inhabitants - in prehistory, not history. Archaeological evidence dating back to 8,000 BC seems to suggest that the present day Peninsular Orang Asli, who mostly speak variants of the Austroasiatic language, unlike the Malays who are Austronesian speakers, are the direct descendants of the Hoabinhians, the earliest well-documented inhabitants of this Tanah Melayu .

As I see it, as a cultural species, I am a descendant of the immigrants. So some people were here first, big deal! Ethnocentrism is too unIslamic for me; I can't pretend that the indigenous got the best deal.

And Indonesia's nation-building success? Please, I remember panicking in the plane- what if my minyak cap kapak (ointment) with its Chinese characters would literally spell trouble with the Indonesian authorities?

My third issue is the idea expressed in Utusan Malaysia , that in the Malay Archipelago, ethnic and geographic divisions never existed.

The idea that most ancient Malay/Indonesian-speaking Islamicised kingdoms were culturally Malay, which is today advocated by parties who feel terhina (insulted) each time their ancestry is said to originate from the Indonesian Archipelago, is in truth an English construction.

That is why this notion cannot explain how in British Malaya, Javanese and Bugis parents could actually produce a Malay son like my father.

If advocates of this belief were to ask a native Muslim Austronesian speaker from Jakarta whether he/she is Malay, chances are the answer will be no, because he/she is 'Javanese' or perhaps even 'Bugis' or 'Batak'.

While the term Malaiyur seemed to point to Sumatra historically, ancient texts in old Malay are obscure on the heritage of the Sumatran Kingdoms of Srivijaya, Jambi and Malaiyur; citing only Bukit Siguntang as the home of the Malay Kings, Melayu being the river near this hill.

These texts use the term Melayu sparingly, often as adjectives for the kings i.e Raja-Raja Melayu (Malay kings) while frequently calling the Malaccan commoners as Orang Melaka . Thus, it has been suggested that Melayu could possibly refer to the ruling class of Bukit Siguntang origin then.

It was only when Hindu Malacca became Muslim that the term Orang Melayu as a distinct 'ethnic', was used interchangeably with Orang Melaka . After the fall of Malacca, the Malays were a group of Muslims of mixed ancestry who pledged loyalty to the Malay Courts of Srivijayan-Malacccan descent who were attached enough to Malacca to practise its trading cultures and speak Malay as a first language.

Some of them remained in the peninsula. Others moved on as a wealthy Southeast Asian mercantile diaspora, the usual suspects that conquered cosmopolitans tend to spawn.

Certainly, the 'Malay Nation' as described by Stamford Raffles upon four years of his arrival in Penang in his essay sent to Bengal, was not a local viewpoint the Malays then were just a group among many other groups who may have spoken fluent Malay as a second language since it was the French of Southeast Asia and dressed modestly too as Muslims.

The language-based 'nation' is after all a pet idea of the English Romantics. Raffles also later renamed a major Malay text, Sulalat al-Salatin (Rules of all the Rajas) that focuses on the lineage and customs of the Malay Kings as The Malay Annals made it sound like the story of a people.

After the English acquired Georgetown, the peninsula that used to be called after its leading city, Malacca, began to appear as the 'Malay Peninsula' in British maps. Then, in 1869, AR Wallace published his work on the natural history, travel and racial classification in the Southeast Asian islands, introducing the word, 'the Malay Archipelago'.

In the 19th century urban Straits Settlement, the English idea of the martial, masculine, modern, united race and nation with a big membership was surely infectious to a diverse group of conquered natives. To intensify their control, the English had to co-operate with the Malay Sultans and pacify their 'subjects'- being very careful of what sort of Malayness that they wanted to maintain in the subjects.

So, they began educating the young Malay-speaking Muslim natives and immigrants from diverse ethnicity with classic Malay court texts that uphold loyalty to the Malay Kings to restrain the modernising local urban literati.

By 1918, they were imposed with Kitab Tawarikh Melayu (the Malay history book). By the 1940s, Ibrahim Yaakob was already complaining that there were too many natives who still saw themselves as Minang or Boyanese , instead of Malays. Inevitably, Malay nationalism then found its victorious footing in the peninsula and not Sumatra.

So Mr Rajendra, although I never really liked most of your corny poems, unlike Mazeni Alwi, I thank you for crossing the road anyway.