Work To Be Done In Perak & Elsewhere: Making peoples’ lives easier
By Syed Akbar Ali
Before I start this comment I would like to pay tribute and acknowledge a good friend of mine Mirza Mohamed Talib Beg for telling me a very simple thing many years ago, which has helped me achieve many, many things which I know I would not have been able to achieve otherwise. Talib simply said ‘Make life easy for people’.
These are actually five magical words or kata-kata keramat.
Other than (or despite) our education, the skills we gain and the experiences we garner I found these five simple words a most powerful and most useful life philosophy. To make life easy for the people around us. And it is also an extremely effective self serving philosophy – in business, in careers and in almost everything that we need to do.
We get repeat business from our customers when we make it easier for them to transact with us instead of someone else who may not be as user friendly. We make more friends when we make our friends feel at ease and secure in our presence or if we can help them in some way that lifts some burden from them. And it goes on.
And the same philosophy must apply in politics. In fact this must be the cornerstone of politics, especially in our multi racial, multi religious and multi cultural society. We must all seek to make life easier for the next person.
With that I would like to talk about some issues in Perak, the State of my birth. Lets face it – 2013 is just around the corner. For the BN to win back the trust of the people (plus the five States and the 2/3 majority), we cannot do it by last minute resurfacing of roads or changing roofs on sekolah jenis kebangsaan and churches. People don’t buy that anymore. In fact when the BN does that, the people meluat even more. They get the distinct impression that they are worth no more to the BN than a few roof tiles or a tarred road.
