Rambling about " Bangsa"

On the night of Halloween, the word "bangsa" was eerily used in the euphoria of the JDT team's being crowned as the first South East Asian club winning the AFC Cup. I will touch on this later ...

First and foremost, I have to congratulate JDT for their perseverance also my hats off to all Johoreans. A special congratulations to HRH the Johor Crown Prince who, I would say singlehandedly unite all Johoreans and spearheaded the team to victory. HRH had been and always has been a vocal critic of the national football body, FAM. FAM being FAM always live in denial would just brushed off HRH the Crown Prince criticisms on how to managed the affairs and interests of the national football. With this win, HRH via JDT had shown those "little Napoleons" at FAM on how to manage a football team efficiently and successfully. Kudos to HRH and JDT as well as the Johoreans.

My only concern is that the usage of the "Bangsa Johor" seen at the banners depicting the victorious team. I feel that the usage of "Bangsa Johor" would further complicate our current impasse on achieving the ultimate goal of having a single race i.e. 'Bangsa Malaysia". Nothing had been done to achieve the "Bangsa Malaysia" vision not even from those politicians. I would say the politicians are the biggest culprit of all. Recently, it was reported that " Bangsa Dayak" had been officially recognised as a "race" in Sarawak and the Sabah Government had abolished the column "Lain-Lain Bangsa" in the state's official forms. I am not against these efforts as perhaps they might be taken as a  step to legitimately recognised a certain race and in the Sabah's case, this would "narrow down" the already mass number of races in Malaysia.

In reality, this is not the case. Just take any of the official government forms, the boxes for race are still there with the main races of "Malay", Chinese", "Indians" and "Lain -Lain" are still there. I just could not comprehend what does it mean by "Lain-Lain". It is so insanely alien ... As far as I know - I might be wrong here - could remember no Malaysians of any races had ever just leave those boxes blank and write the words "Bangsa Malaysia" including yours truly. Perhaps I still did not have the political strength to do this.

Back to " Bangsa Johor" ... these two words to my mind will further put a spanner to our goal and vision of being "Bangsa Malaysia". I am afraid after this should Pahang were to win any silverware, ' Bangsa Pahang" would then crop us and just imagine we have thirteen states plus the Federal Territories of KL, Labuan and Putrajaya in this country of ours. I could not imagine the race boxes will become crowded in those forms ....

Just think about it and I parted with a big congratulations to HRH the Johor Crown Prince, JDT and "rakyat Johor" ......