What are interviewer’s worse fears? For us it would be not being able to get in contact with the person we need to talk to. That was what happened to us when we tried to contact Khailee Ng. Our lecturers Miss Roslina and Miss Yogeetha actually have already prepared the bloggers for each of our group and it was up to us to choose which blogger we wanted. We had Marina Mahathir, Rockie Bru, Beautiful Nara, Kenny Sia and lastly Khailee Ng. If I am not wrong, if any of our groups ever get a chance to interview Tun Mahathir, it would be a great honor.
Our group came to choose Khailee Ng because he usually blogs about youths. We could not contact him by phone so we found his email and mailed him asking for an interview. But as days went by, we had yet to receive any respond from him. So on 19th of October, we went to look for our lecturers to tell them about our problem and they asked us to keep trying. Day by day we waited in front of our laptops waiting for Khailee’s response but in the end all our patience was in vain because we found out that Khailee had went to Russia for the tiger conservation program and was probably too busy to see our email. It was already November and we were starting to panic because our deadline was around the corner.
Interestingly enough, Miss Yogee finally helped us to find another blogger for the interview. We were also told that he was involved in the “Recolor May 13” program and he is Anas Zubedy. We thought it would be interesting to interview him because racial integrity in our country is an issue and May 13 incident is definitely something for us to remember.
We went ahead to contact Anas Zubedy but it was no easy task. We have gone through numerous obstacles in arranging the date for the interview since we are all working and he was busy as well. Despite that, we were glad because we finally managed to set 26th November 2010 for the interview at 7.30pm in his office at Damansara. It was a real challenge when it comes to locating his office because we were going from separate ways. Fortunately, everything went through smoothly as we reached his office on time and was greeted with a warm welcome by him and everyone in his office.
Our first impression of Anas was that he is a really tall man with really long eyelashes. It was a really interesting sharing session because we have came to understand so much more about him and his thoughts about Malaysia and the unity of its people. Besides that, he never fails to add on a little humor to his answers and it did made us laugh throughout the interview. We began our session by asking Anas to tell us a little bit about himself.
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Anas Zubedy was born in Penang in 1954 and had lived there for 20 years before he moved to KL to study in University Malaya. “I went to Penang free school and then to UM to study economics at that time was known as public administration” said Anas.
Anas started blogging about a few years ago. When asked how did he get into the blogging trend, he said, “I thought maybe I can connect with people as one of the channel of communication, so I had to do some blogging. That’s how it happened. I think rather than why I do blogging, it’s interesting to know that after blogging, I made some really good friends, some new friends.”
“I think there are not many centrist around in terms of bloggers,” said Anas. He thinks that being a centrist is how he is different from other bloggers. Besides getting to know new friends in the blogosphere, he also mentioned that he is good friends with fellow bloggers. Among them are Marina Mahathir and Rocky Bru.
As he mention, he had started blogging for a few years ago and he said that through blogging he want to know how people feel and what people say, what do Malaysians thinks about a certain topics by getting feedbacks on the things he posted on blogs and even on Facebook which became one of his favorite hobbies.
“So blogging give you some feedback. I think blogging make me write a little bit more, it helps me focus to write something, if not I won’t write. So the blogging make me write” Said Anas when he was ask what had he gain through blogging.
He grew up among many different races when he was young. He speaks Hokkien because of he lived in a Chinese area and his best friend was an Indian boy. That also explains why he is one strong believer in unity of races more than anyone else.
“We grew up in a country where unity is a constant reminder. We are constant reminded of self that we have to unite.” Anas also believes that a country cannot survive without unity. “If we don’t unite we will crumble, we will definitely fall flat,” he added.
Since Anas is a person who loves history, he shared some of his opinions on Malaysian history and Malaysian youths.
When asked of his opinion about Malaysian youths’ perception about Malaysian unity, Anas responded, “I think Malaysian youth now, it’s a little bit sad. I’m one of those who think that we shouldn’t have more than one stream of education. I think that was a mistake, a historical mistake.” He thinks that the Chinese, Indians and Malays are all growing up in their own circle of friends from the same race. He blames the education system because in the past, no matter what race you are from, everyone studies under one roof. But unlike nowadays, the standard of education has gone down. Chinese has a much more practical way of thinking. They send their children to Chinese school because the education system is higher.
“To solve the problem, we need to solve that thing first. Make sure they have the best teacher, the best whatever in a normal school, then only people will start moving back,” he added.
We called it a day after a long interview with him and we took some pictures before we left.
