Growing up

These past weeks, I’ve found myself changing. Hopefully for the better.

My mindset has changed, my priorities had changed, my interests had changed.

I left the whole MTV mindset behind now and moved towards the Financial Times mindset.

I’m now more interested in news, whether normal or business, more than I am interested in songs. And that’s a little shitty for someone who hasn’t even touched the 25 year-old mark.

Maybe this is because of the desire to start building myself up financially and moving towards a more matured thinking. And maybe it’s also towards the fact that my family would soon be starting our own business. Just a small one.

But for me, I’m already planning on whether this business has an opportunity for expansion.

On a totally unrelated topic, there was an interesting discussion on the radio this morning.

The deejays were asking callers if they had talked back to their parents before and whether do the callers think it is a good thing or a bad thing.

Being Asians, we were always taught never to talk back to your parents or elders or superiors. This concept had been drilled into our mind that it’s against ethics to talk back to someone who’s of a higher position. In classrooms, we were never taught to voice out our opinions on serious topics. We just have to accept everything the teacher says, and we learn blindly. Failing to question the norm and push the teachers into explaining facts until that fact is justified.

This makes us Asians non-confrontation nations. Most of us dare not voice ourselves out over things we sometimes do not agree on. Even when we do agree on things and are largely satisfied, we still keep it to ourselves and do not voice it out publicly. We never compliment the chef for an excellent meal, nor acknowledge an employee for a good and thorough service.

So when people give orders, which you’re not fully agreeable with, you’d still kowtow and just accept it for the way it is.

I wouldn’t say everyone is that way. We Malaysians have gone a long way to speaking our minds publicly. But not enough.

We shout out our dissatisfactions, while hiding behind the curtains, hoping that no one will point out exactly who said that.

If we had all been trained to voice opinions and speak our minds at an early age, we would grow up with a more matured mindset rather than one which is half dead and only knows how to take orders and not analyse it.

The Western countries had long started expressing themselves freely and openly and this is one of the reasons they progress way faster than we could ever have. By having discussions and debates, we elevate our mindset and our analysis on issues faced. By keeping things to ourselves, nothing gets analysed and we don’t go anywhere with it.

In fact, if we had escaped from this non-confrontational mindset earlier, Malaysia would’ve been a much more developed and mature nation.

And, please. Debating and arguing on who should be Prime Minister and who should take which State seats is a whole load of bullshit in our country’s issues.

The whole world is debating about the Global Economic crisis and our local news is focusing on who’s going to be PM, who’s quitting the Cabinet and stupid tri-elections.

That’s just so pathetically childish.

I like the way the Obama administration is going. Even their national car maker and one of the biggest car manufacturer in the world, General Motors (GM), has to fight to obtain financial backing from the Government. Or else, it’s pack up and close down.

Same can’t be said with Proton now, can it?