The Bangsar Boy: The tribute to Yasmin Ahmad that didn’t make the pages

I’m not sure why my article I submitted on Thursday did not make the pages of StarMetro today for my fortnightly column The Bangsar Boy. Maybe there was no space, or my article was a little late – I spent the morning of my day off helping out The Star Online with the livechat with Health Minister Liow Tiong Lai.

It’s too late now and I think next week would be too late for me to use the same story. So I will share it here instead:

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By NIKI CHEONG

I HAVE never taken to deaths of public personalities easily. I’m not sure whether it is me just being a very sensitive person, or one that gets easily caught up in hype, but I have a tendency of becoming upset whenever I hear about the death of a public figure I admire.

I spent the whole of Merdeka Day in 1997 lying down on a couch in dad’s hometown Malacca watching the developments of Lady Diana, Princess of Wales’ accident which lead to her death. It was a little morbid, but the constant change of text at the bottom of the screen from, “Princess Diana in accident” change to “critical” and then “dead” but I was completely captivated.

In fact, I was so devastated that I turned to the Internet to grief and created a website in tribute of her memory which has lead to my dad calling me a royalist, and my relatives buying me biographies of Diana as gifts.

Then a couple of years later, when John F Kennedy Jr went missing, I created an online vigil in the form a website called Thoughts and Prayers for the Kennedys. It is even mentioned on the BBC Online although the website does not exist anymore.

There were two recent deaths that, like JFK Jr and Lady Diana’s, shocked many people as it was so sudden.

Michael Jackson was the first, barely a month ago. I had grown up as a fan of his and while I wasn’t as obsessed over him as I was over The Spice Girls, I still had this deep appreciation for his work.

The impact he had was obviously tremendous and the morning we heard about his death, my colleagues and I went for breakfast carrying a portable radio player because all the radio stations were playing his songs over and over in tribute. When You Are Not Alone came on, we all just teared up and started sniffling.

After all, I grew up with his music and songs like We Are The World remain a major inspiration in my life.

And this was with someone who none of us have ever met. So imagine my heartbreak when I heard about the death of Yasmin Ahmad just last weekend. Although we were not good friends, I had the pleasure of meeting her on several occasions, first professionally and then later, in more social settings.

With Yasmin’s death, it is obvious that each individual in the country chose to mourn her in their own way. I took to my blog again while others showed up at the mosque to pay last respects or drew murals as is obvious via the many media reports and tributes.

Naturally, the death of someone so inspiring and so close to home got me thinking about our local icons; how sad that we never truly appreciate our heroes until they are gone. While she was alive, I saw her as a great figure in advertising (I loved her commercials more than some of her movies, to be honest) but I never realised the impact she played on my life.

But as the tributes started flowing in from every form of media and I was reacquainted with her earlier works and reminded about her later ones, I remembered how I grew up with some of the values that she tried to instill through her commercial work – especially that of multi-culturalism.

So many people have written about how Yasmin imagined 1Malaysia before the term was coined, and that the many people from different backgrounds mourning her death is testament to that.

I believe that Malaysians had once achieved a sense of being colour blind. I’ve never spoken to her about it but I think that Yasmin’s films and commercials are not about showing us what the world could be if we just accepted one another, but to remind us that it already exists.

Many families – like mine, with my two sisters marrying people from other races and religions –  are testament to that.

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My original blog post to accompany my usual plug for the article was about two articles I had written related to Yasmin. The first was featured on the front page of The Star on Tuesday last week. I had seen a picture of this mural tribute to Yasmin at the river banks along Pasar Seni LRT station and informed the editors about it. A photographer was assigned and I contacted Jeng, the street artist, for an interview.

It was my first ever lead and story for the front page of the paper so I was very proud (even if the story was burried in page 10!).

I was also going to announce that I am one of the authors for Global Voices Online. The site is a Harvard project that was incepted in 2005. It describes itself as:

Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.

My first post was on Yasmin which was uploaded on Wednesday. I was asked to be a volunteer with the site in April, but didn’t have the time to get things moving until now. Hopefully I will be able to update it on a more frequent basis from now on.

It’s a long couple of weeks ahead for me, with Short+Sweet, work and a potential trip overseas for work next Sunday. In the mean time, have a good weekend folks

10.08am Malaysian time (+8 GMT)