Coming together for Tali Tenang #talitenang

Many of you might have heard about Tali Tenang by now. For the past few days, my friends and I (as well as well-wishers and supporters) have been spamming heavily promoting the event on social media sites like our blogs, Twitter and Facebook.

Well, the event happened yesterday (I wrote about it and another similar event in my The Bangsar Boy column published in StarMetro yesterday). Organised by United Colours of Malaysia (a Facebook group) with the support of RandomAlphabets.com (a non-profit group I’ve been working in for the past couple of years), it look to bring people from various backgrounds to unite in the name of peace.

i.e. In the face of all the troubles plaguing our country, we wanted to show that there are cool people around lah.

The event was the brainchild of Zain HD, Juanna Jaafar and Jennie Yang. We sent out a Facebook invite for the event, as well as spread the word on Twitter just over a week ago, but only announced the exact location of the meet-up on Thursday. The event was slated to be held at 5pm on Saturday (yesterday).

The location? Bangsar LRT station.

The invite asked people to bring along a piece of rope, dress in white and carry a Malaysian flag, if they had one.

The crowd only started building up at exactly 5pm, when the crew (in the first picture above) moved from Old Town White Coffee to the meeting point. There, everyone started joining their ropes together – connecting one person to the next, basically. Some brought ribbons, others had decorations attached to their ropes.

Once all the pieces of roped were nicely tied together, we were ready to move out. The idea was that the participants (including actress Liza Othman and Lembah Pantai MP Nurul Izzah Anwar) – all 250 who showed up! – would walk from the LRT station through Bangsar and meet at Bangsar Sports Complex.

Some of the crew members, including myself, left a few minutes before the participants. In fact, we got there early enough to pose for a shot (thank goodness for the timer function). The crew above were from two teams – one were the traffic wardens (who made sure no one got killed trying to cross the road) while another group was there to cut the long rope into a few pieces as we were going to divide the participants and walk through different parts of Bangsar in groups.

My specific role was to be across the street from those guys and identify which of the teams crossing the streets would go through which part of Bangsar. Each group would be escorted by our tour guides, who arrived slightly later than us. That’s how I managed to get a shot of them all from across the street as you can see below.

Can you spot TV personality Rina Omar, Fly.fm DJ Jules and rapper Altimet in the group?

I suppose it was easier for us to walk in slow groups, than it was for the participants with a really long piece of rope. So there was some waiting involved (as you can see from the faces of the Tour Guide troop below). Still, we tried to make as much noise as possible – and even got honks and shout-outs from cars passing by. Traffic slowed down a bit as people tried to see what we were up to – sorry yeah, Bangsar drivers!

Anyway, the whole point was to invite people to join us, and to wave and smile as people we meet and spread the love and goodwill. Some people actually joined us midway, which was great and also Twittered their support as they saw us walk by (@cziplee gave us a shout out as we walked past their store!).

The shot below was just outside Bangsar Village II and Czip Lee, and this was actually the first group to break off from the rest. They were also the ones leading the whole parade, Juana thought it was apt that the Malaysia flag led the way.

We managed to break everyone into five groups. Among the routes they took included going through Bangsar Village, walking through the Telawi Streets as well as moving past McDonald’s. We passed quite a few housing areas as well and got some people’s attention.

The road leading to Bangsar Sports Complex that we all opted to take way Jalan Terasek 3, a road I am very familiar with. I grew up on that road, my childhood babysitter lives there. As I walked by getting ready to great the arriving participants, I saw Aunty Nelly, Uncle George and their son Taffy outside so I popped in to say hi. I haven’t seen them in a while. I ran out to take the shot below but what really got to me was all three of them clapped for us as the lines marched by. It was an amazing feeling.

I wasn’t there when they arranged everyone to sit down like in the picture below. Zain, Rina and I had zoomed off to Shell and bought cartons of mineral water for everyone – since we didn’t exactly tell everyone how much exercise they would be doing (that’s the way we work hehe), not everyone had brought water with them.

When we arrived back though, everyone was already nice seated and the rope had been joined back together. I thought that it was terribly symbolic. For me personally, it was the sign of people from a myriad of backgrounds coming together and connecting, and while it may look like we have disconnected (mostly to address obstacles along the way – in this case, the traffic light), we all move through time and space and eventually come back together as one. And reconnect.

At this point, Zain thanked everyone for their participation and explained why this even was organised. He credited Juana and Jennie for collaborating with him and spoke from the heart about why we were all there. It was so nice to see heads nod in unison and the smiles on the faces of people who were a bit tired. We had some fun, and did the Mexican wave, and Kallang wave – but alamak, Malaysian wave tak de ke? LOL

Almost two hours after we all gathered, everyone went off on their own way. Some people got lifts from one another (people who didn’t know each other before), some grouped together to walk back to the LRT station and others took cabs I suppose.

Some of us went for food and drinks at Pelita in Bangsar to just relax, talk a bit about what happened and mostly catch up. For me, it was a real fulfilling day, and while I didn’t do too much, it still felt great being part of such a wonderful team.

We got great write ups in the papers today – in The Star and NST – and some blog posts have already gone up.

Just a shot to part with, I really like this one of Marina with her daughters Ineza and Shasha.

4.18pm Malaysian time (+8 GMT)

Tags: #talitenang, altimet, Bangsar, bangsar lrt station, bangsar sports complex, bangsar village ii, czip lee, facebook, fly fm, jennie yang, juanna jaafar, jules, lembah pantai mp, liza othman, Malaysia, marina mahathir, new straits times, Nurul Izzah Anwar, old town white coffee, pelita, randomalphabets.com, rina omar, rope, social media, StarMetro, Tali Tenang, telawi, terasek, The Bangsar Boy, The Star, Twitter, united colors of malaysia, zain hd