The occasion of the launch of the memoirs of legal luminary, PG Lim, provided a member of the steering committee of Bersih to give a plug to one of the electoral reform pressure group’s demands - a longer campaign period for the general election.

NONE Toh Kin Woon, in remarks made at the launch of ‘Kaleidoscope’ in Penang today, observed that Lim contested in the 1964 general election for the state constituency of Sentul in Selangor on a Labor Party ticket.

“The campaign period then was five weeks and Bersih is only asking for three,” said the former Gerakan legislator and Penang state executive councillor.

NONE Moved perhaps by the audience’s palpable surprise on being apprised of the length of the campaign period of an election that was held at the height of the Confrontation with Indonesia (1963-65), Toh could not resist the plug:

“That is why I urge you all to be at the sit-down protest that will be held on April 28 in Kuala Lumpur.”

Pleasant surprise segued into admiration when Toh listed the achievements of the Cambridge educated Lim, now 96, who broke several “glass ceilings” as one of the country’s first female political and social activists.

Legal doyenne

Toh remarked that Lim had deserted her class - she was born in London to wealthy parents (her father was from Penang and mother from British Guyana) who met while they were studying in Cambridge during the First World War - to make common cause with Malaya’s (and later Malaysia’s) working class.

NONE Lim represented people condemned to death for sedition and espoused the cause of trade unions fighting for better wages and working conditions.

Toh’s comments were not lost on an audience aware that the fast approaching general election is being viewed as a contest between the appropriative capitalism of BN and the social democracy of Pakatan Rakyat.

But the legal doyenne whose memoirs was being lauded confined herself, in a brief video that was shown of an pre-book launch interview she had given, to terse and playful remarks on the nature of the autobiographical art and of the life she had lived.

It was a reminder that levity is an aid to longevity.