That damned Michiko Kakutani from the New York Times has managed to snag a copy of Deathly Hallows before its release and had time enough to read it and give a review within one day! Warning! Minor spoilers contained within. (Why! Why did I click and read it! Sob sob sob)
Kam Raslan's right. In the preface for his new book, Confessions of an Old Boy: The Dato' Hamid Adventures he writes that we've known Dato' Hamid all our lives. Seeing as my own dad is an old boy of MCKK, the people I get to meet when he drags me to an Old Boy function and the people he tells me of, reflect the characters found in Kam's book. It really does feel like I've known Dato' Hamid all my life. Dato' Hamid is a civil servant of the Tunku Abdul Rahman generation. He is the sort of person you rarely see nowadays, a fine example of the anachronistic Malay. This generation, groomed in the ways of the colonial British would be out of place not just in 21st century Malaysia, but in Britain too. And yet, Dato' Hamid, in all his snobbishness and patronising ways, is essentially a Malaysian. Without people like him, our country would probably never exist at all. At least not like we know it now. I'm glad that Kam Raslan decided to capture this ...
i ALMOST clicked on the link..
ReplyDeletebut i ternampak "sob sob". hah! that's it. tak jadi.
Jangan! Haha... wait til saturday! I'll probably be boycotting the internet for the whole of tomorrow... just in case.
ReplyDelete