Election Day

In a little less than a week, my countrymen will head to the polls to cast their vote in one of the most hard-fought elections this country has ever seen. If all goes well, I shall be amongst their ranks queuing up for the ballot box - for the fourth time in my life.

Hopefully that day goes down in history as the biggest change ever made in our country where the ruling party has governed the nation continuously for more than five decades. The large majority of citizens here have never even known any other ruling government other than the one recently at its helm.

And as we all know, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Without proper checks and balances, it leads to horribly unjust practices being carried out almost everywhere you look. Something I slowly came to realize when I started work in the busy corridors of our inner-city hospitals.

Back in school, it was alright when I found out that my results would manage to bring me to a local university to study medicine. Already quite an achievement, especially with my largely average grades. Have to admit it hurt just a little when I realized that non-Bumiputras weren't allowed to apply for certain degrees and scholarships but it was okay. Shrugging it off, I always figured someone better, someone living under far worse circumstances, someone infinitely more deserving would benefit from our generous government scholarships.

The infamous racially biased quota notwithstanding, our country's seemingly beneficial affirmative action policies at work.

But maybe it would go to the earnest, hard-working child of an impecunious rubber-tapper in the rural estates.

Time to make our opinions - and votes - count

Then when I graduated and came out to work, I realized that I was hopelessly naive - and apparently mistaken in my idealistic beliefs. Rather than hand out scholarships to admirable scholars of sadly impoverished circumstance, we instead saw fellow physicians hailing from illustrious, wealthy society families coming to work in their imported luxury cars - and all of them scholarship holders from abroad. With lovely mansions in established neighbourhoods, dressed to the nines in branded couture with wallets full of cash, they still found themselves largely unembarassed to be receiving government aid that could have gone to someone more in need of it.

Became increasingly obvious that proper connections were far more important than academic merit even when you're of the right race and colour.

That is the kind of ruling government we had. And that is barely the tip of the iceberg.

And that is why we need a change.