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Selamat Pagi Malaysia!

For me, the greatness of Indonesia is the language that binds every Indonesian to each other. From Jokowi to the Becak driver still plying the streets of Yogyakarta, Solo, Medan and Cirebon, they speak to each other in Bahasa Indonesia.... it is their primary lingua franca.

Anywhere in the world, when you hear Indonesian being spoken, you do not think of them in terms of their ethnicity...they are all Indonesian. On the trams and in the streets of Melbourne, I come across groups of Indonesians chattering away with each other in Indonesian, and from their accentuation, you cannot mistake them for being anybody else but Indonesians. And they are proud to be Indonesians.

Malaysians are a different lot. Bahasa does not bind us. If we do speak Bahasa with each other anywhere else in the world, it is often done softly softly...as if we are embarrassed to use Bahasa in public. More often than not, Malaysians, when abroad, speak English to each other.

Why am I, a Malay who speaks, thinks, and write 95% of the time in English, asking why Malaysians do not have a language that binds us to each other as the Indonesians do? Doesn't every Malaysian speak English? Maybe they do, but guys, English is a language foreign to us. Why do we need a foreign language to bind us together? Why not Bahasa?

There was a time when Malaysians spoke Malay with each other without being conscious that we were doing so.

When you speak Malay to a Chinese, you unconsciously vary your accentuation just ever so slightly to make the Chinese you are speaking to, and you, a tad more comfortable. In the course of the conversation, you throw in words like Aiyah...towkay...lu sudah makan...nang boti nang. When you want to emphasize disappointment or benign anger, you slip in phrases like 'kan ni nia'....or that 'tui nia seng'....all in jest, no malice intended.

You do the same when you are talking with an Indian. The tone will be more casual...friendlier even, and the accentuation of certain words more emphasized with a lot of broken English words getting involved in the process. And the occasional use of 'phordah' now and then to show disbelief of what is being said...with, again, with no malice intended.

But those were the days.

Today, if we speak to each other ...it is not in Malay anymore. It is in Bahasa! And in proper Bahasa, where each one tries to outdo the other with words that I have never even heard before. I still say sembahyang not 'solat'. ...and I am not even going to try and identify the many words now in use in Bahasa that was nonexistent during my time growing up.

My point is simply this...maybe I am too old to change from using English 95% of the time to using Bahasa 95% of the time, but is it not time that the powers that be make a concerted effort to educate our young to use Bahasa in the same way that Indonesians use Indonesian?

Educate our young to be Malaysians. The same education for all Malaysians, the same medium of instruction for everyone in every school - and maybe one, or at most, two generations from now, Malaysians will start the irreversible process of being one people, with one language but diversity galore! And the diversity will not matter because Bahasa will bind us to one another.

For sure, I will have problems fitting into a Malaysia where Bahasa is the primary lingua franca...but if done right, my grandchildren won't. And surely the problems of one old man (me) having difficulty fitting in, matters not when our future generations are united by a common language, BAHASA - as the Indonesians are today united by the Indonesian language? Kan?