COMMENT It is always a pleasure to return for visits to Penang for whatever reason. This is more so knowing that Penang is the state that Tunku Abdul Rahman, our beloved founding father, chose to retire upon his graceful withdrawal in 1970 as the pre-Independence chief minister of Malaya and the first prime minister of Malaya and Malaysia.

In this regard, I cannot thank Mohd Yussof Latiff, chairperson of the Penang State Consultative Goodwill Council, enough for his having invited me to launch a collection of quotations reflecting the Tunku’s wisdom and keen observations of politics and the social fusion that make up the Malaysian melting pot and the societal issues that popped up their ugly heads once in a while.

I would also like to thank the Goodwill Council for seeing it fit to have me at this gathering that is simultaneously the celebration of its 10th anniversary. Please accept my heartiest congratulations on this undertaking and on achieving your 10th milestone.

The collection, aptly named ‘Enduring truths from statements and words of Al-Marhum Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj our beloved founder of our nation’, to mark the 111th anniversary of the Tunku’s birth on Feb 8, 1903 is without doubt a most useful collectible as our founding father is without peers and has been assured of a place in Malaysian as well as world histories.

More importantly, it is a good source of information on the Tunku for the Generation X, those who came into the world during the period 1961-81 and, to an extent, the Generation Y, those born after 1981.

Getting to know our founding father through his wise words will mitigate, in some ways, the denial to these generations the story of our independence. It will also make familiar the Tunku’s critical role in nursing it through as was symbolically visualised and auralised by his spirited cry of Merdeka that echoed across the newly-built Merdeka Stadium after declaring the Proclamation of Independence on Aug 31, 1957.

The Merdeka story bears reminding and retelling because there are mischievous quarters that would rather consign the Tunku’s pivotal role to the dustbin of history.

Obscene though this may sound, there is the odd megalomaniacal displeasure with the Tunku to the extent of denying his role in the birth of the Federation of Malaya, which together with Sabah, Sarawak and initially Singapore went on to form Malaysia. In this regard, he was known to have been saddened by a certain history textbook that took the same line to ignore that role...