cultural issues in one cultured countries..

maybe this is kinda outdated to talk about culture issues between Indonesia and Malaysia... but late is always permitted than keeping silence.. (silence is not always like a gold, though..)

first time let me introduce myself. i have something to do with malaysian. my beloved wife is malaysian, ehm, north kalimantan to be precise. they are quite different with those semenanjung malaysian. my wife’s family always said “thats semenanjung, not us..” if i asked her about those “pirating” issues. hahahaha.. from this, we know that they are not very unified, as a result of a premature unification by the british empire at 1963.

they also said its forbidden ( kalau orang sunda teh bilang ini pamali’ ) for north bornean to speak semenanjung…wah wah wah..makin banyak aja nih bahasa di malaysia, udah bahasa melayu semenanjung, cina, india, sekarang ini pula… PEACE bro…

actually, they always admire us because of our nationality and sense of “one” (unified, for precise).. when we go to medan for example, we can easily talk indonesia to communicate with people. not like them.

back to topic. from my marriage, i can see that people in north borneo are very different than semenanjung.. they are highly creative. there we can find so many dance, song, and other civilization products, or known as culture.

i dont know what is their (their refers to..ehm malaysian.., or maybe semenanjung only?) thinking of pirating our culture. maybe they want to be creative so that they can attract other side of “malaysian” to be united like us. but whats the benefit for them? they already “occupied” the north borneo, and there are only around 2,5 million people at north borneo, or 10% of total malaysian population ( hey man.. thats insignificant number for separation feeling.. ).. no benefit for them..

or maybe they just lack of recources supporting them from Malaysia Trully Asia campaign? maybe they lack of culture diversity, or to be exact, culture originality.. most of culture there dominated by culture coming from outside of semenanjung.. and they are desperate to find their original culture.. and so they began to “adapt” our culture as their closest relatives..

dulu batik, angklung, keris, eh sekarang lagu…

we are historically close to them..only imperialism and colonialism made us apart. there is one dance, zapin dance, that shows us the close relation between us (sumatra) and semenanjung..thats one of few evidences.

but thats not the reason of rasa sayange claim. we all know that its a maluku song, and speaking of which, its indonesian song. its not close to them. its indonesian!

but wait!! at one of P Ramlee's movie (which i believe made at 1950's or 1960's), one of the background music is lagu "Rasa Sayang"....! soo... who claimed who??

another important thing is about batik. if we take a look carefully to their batik and our batik, we will see some obvious difference.. their batik is not even batik to us. and for them, our batik is not a batik to them. our batik is more to repeated pattern and motives, whereas their batik is more to color and paintings. its two different world with one word definition..

i really hate colonialism and imperialisms in any shape..

back to culture issues

take those all as our precautions to have more respect to our country. to our culture. to our unity. to our independence. it is time for us to respect more about our country. do not let this all happened again..kita jangan lemah lagi kawan. saatnya kita bangga dan berjuang sebagai orang indonesia.
dont ask your country what they have given to you but ask ourself what we have given to our country.

suatu hari nanti, mereka tak kan bisa mengklaim wayang kulit jika wayang kulit itu populer disini. sure of it and shame on them. just imagine if barongsai is claimed by non-chinese race. of course their claim will be very deniable bcoz barongsai is very popular and very common with chinese culture.

our power lies in our respect to our culture and our nation..

merdeka!!