The day Neohikayat is put out of business by competition from publishing houses set up by bands of young Malay writers with actual talent, is the day when I'll know I have done my job. There is no shame in having your life ended by the hands of your own child (or monster, if you prefer the Frankenstein imagery), if that is a signal that you have to make way for a world that has outgrown your usefulness for it.

An old man should know when it is time to retire gracefully, after all, and if he should refuse to, then he ought to be taken out forcefully. As I expect the people before me to yield, so do I submit - however painful it shall turn out to be, for I know I shall resist as the people before me have struggled to resist - to the same dictum.

I started Neohikayat in November last year on a whim, after finally getting tired of hearing all the whining around me about why literature is in the state it is in Malaysia. But this is true of almost anything you care to think of, which makes you wonder, why are these people content to just moan and groan, and hope that someone else will come and do the job? Why don't they get off their arses and change it themselves?

Who's to blame, really?

Me, I blame the NEP. No, really. The government has been working so hard all this while to force the people to give up their power to it, so it cannot now complain that the people have become spineless and lazy. After three decades of being trained to be dependent on the Government Mother for everything you need, it shouldn't come as a surprise that people have lost the ability to get up and do things for themselves.

I take my own life experience as a point of reference (surprise, surprise; and you were wondering when this conversation is going to be about me). I was, by common consensus, a clueless and uber-dependent child. And still am. Throughout life I am always waiting for someone to come wipe my nose for me. Not because I can't do it myself, but because this is what I am used to. It's what I expect.

Here's a parenting tip from someone who is not a parent: when your child tumbles, let him get up on his own. You can be there for him, of course, but you should let him figure things out for himself. This may take longer than it should, but it is a necessary process. He needs to find his own footing, and the more you rush to his aid and prop him up out of sympathy, the crueler a parent you will be.

My problem was that I grew up the first child, and a boy at that, among a group of adoring women. So I never had to do much for myself - even at five, I was pretty much king of the hill. I think, although I can't be sure, that my innate sense of helplessness is what continues to endear me to older women to this day. I can charm mothers into giving away their babies without even blinking; too bad their daughters don't feel the same way. Such is life. Maybe I should just go after the mothers.

Anyway. Getting back to the topic at hand: when you raise a people to be dependent on you, then you have to expect that they will always be turning askance to you for guidance all the time. This may feel good at first, but eventually it will get tiring and annoying, because you end up always having to do all the pulling.

This, I feel, is what the Malaysian government is beginning to feel. That's why now they suddenly have all these fanciful ideas about breeding creativity and self-responsibility. Although for the moment the efforts seem to be aimed at students and public servants (a misnomer if there ever was one), I'm confident that eventually this will be expanded to include everyone.

Clueless

What they don't seem to understand (or they do, but then pretend like it's not a contradiction) is that you cannot have creativity while still wanting to maintain a tight yoke on people's thinking. Creativity means just that: the freedom to think and behave as you wish.

But a government that is used to dictating terms for a whole generation is not going to let go of such a delicious consequence of power that easily. (I should know: I still expect my brothers to do my bidding whenever I'm at my parents' home, because that's what I'm used to.) So we have this paradox - a most common one, I should add - of the mouth saying one thing and the hand doing another.

Witness, for example, the recent Jawi raid and the setting up of moralistic vigilante groups (based on whose morals, you wonder). They come in the shadow of our PM's speechifying about the need for us to cultivate independent thought and loosening of the authoritative yoke.

To live your life as you think is called being honest. To think something and then say it out loud but not follow up with action is something that the Quran roundly berates. In fact, God Himself directly challenges such people: "Why do you talk about what you do not do?"

But these days talkers are what we have in abundance. I'm one of them. And it is partly my guilty conscience that forces me to start Neohikayat when I did. I mean, when God slaps you in the face like that, you'd be worse that a deadwood if you didn't feel ashamed at your behaviour.

Especially noteworthy is the fact that these are not calang-calang people doing the whining: among them are writers and dignitaries of the local literati. Between them, I'm quite sure they could easily muster the resources - as in, money and talent - to produce something to colour the local literary world. Yet they

sit and wait and do nothing. Why? Because that's what they are used to.

It's the same conundrum that I keep chewing on with the indie film scene: why is it that before Amir Muhammad released Lips to Lips in 2001 (?), no one thought of just picking up the camera and shooting what they want? When you think about it, it's such a simple little thing. But reality, as we find out every now and then, has a tendency of making the simplest things so darned complicated.

That's why now you're finding an explosion of young film-makers in our midst. We keep staring at a closed door thinking that it's locked until someone else walks up to it, turns the knob and walks through. And then suddenly we all realise just how easy it actually is. So simple you'll slap your head wondering why no one thought of it before.

And I hope, within two years time, the Malay literary scene, too, will see such colour. I hope in two years' time Neohikayat will either find itself hard-pressed to innovate, or that it will cease to exist altogether because it has become an archaic idea.

RUHAYAT X is a publisher-writer-thinker. Visit his site, Neohikayat Press .