[781] Of P. Ramlee and moving forward

Last week, Fenomena Seni (tag) – a program on Radio Televisyen Malaysia (RTM) that discusses the state of the arts in Malaysia – created a considerable buzz in the Malaysian blogosphere. I missed the excitement but this week, I caught it on TV and it didn’t disappoint me. The program is rich in vigor and probably, along with Debat Perdana, might herald RTM’s renaissance. Anyway, the topic for this week is about P. Ramlee; the program raises the question, are Malaysians giving P. Ramlee too much credit?

The question was raised in Malay and given that I have problem recalling the exact phrase, I might be guilty of mistranslating the question. But within context, I’m confident that it’s accurate.

For the uninitiated, P. Ramlee is considered by many Malaysians as the greatest actor, director and songwriter Malaysia has ever produced. I don’t want to go too much into why P. Ramlee is great. So, I’ll leave you with an article from the trusty ol’ Wikipedia.

The general sentiment of the show was that P. Ramlee is great and nobody should question that. While the show was running, a survey was conducted and the result was announced at the end. The proposition of the survey is similar to the topic and a little over 80% of the survey correspondents answered no. Though the survey wasn’t scientific, if a scientific survey were conducted instead, I doubt the yield would differ by much.

There were three guests on the show. One of them, Member of Parliament from Sri Gading, Mohamed Aziz, repeatedly said that nobody will be able to match P. Ramlee, reinforcing the 80% opinion. I feel that is an unfortunate conclusion that bares dim future for the Malaysian song and film industry.

If this is the case, then nobody would be able to challenge P. Ramlee’s greatness. Nowhere in the future will Malaysia be able to produce an artist better than P. Ramlee because a majority thinks nobody could match P. Ramlee. Because of this, I feel we are looking too much into the past. We grant P. Ramlee the status of god that today, many of us would feel offended by the slightest suggestion that somebody might be better than P. Ramlee. This is no right mindset to move forward.

If P. Ramlee must be left unchallenged, I fear the Malaysian song and film industry will never improve. All of us are too scared to be better than our predecessors, much less a god. After all, challenging a god is an unthinkable blasphemous act, isn’t it?

Such fear is unfounded and an obstacle to a better Malaysia. That god is the creation of our mind. For each that we created, we could uncreate. It’s important for us to take back the godlike status we have conferred to P. Ramlee, if P. Ramlee is preventing us from moving forward.