An obvious icon for 1Malaysia

Yasmin Ahmad has contributed more than most politicians in creating better understanding and acceptance among Malaysians.

The simple but emotive messages in her TV commercials tug at our heartstrings. Her films traverse race, class and age barriers with themes and scenes that are so contrary to the trite.

Her touching tales on love, friendship, respect, dignity and forgiveness make us laugh, cry and kindle our capacity to think.

Yes, Yasmin Ahmad let us see the hidden threads that bind us.

She was scorned at home by the usual bigots and self-proclaimed cultural puritans but her works won global acclaim and numerous awards.

Unlike them, she could always see the big picture. And she tried her darndest to make us colour blind to see it more clearly.

If the idea of 1Malaysia needs an icon, she can be it.

A scrutiny of her work might help better define the concept that still appears to be foggy to many both within and outside the Government.

Her movies and ads prove that Malaysians can easily relate to each other when it comes to core feelings and values.

In terms of numbers, her body of work might not be big but it is certainly prodigious in significance, especially with political and ethnic ruptures widening as never before.

Yasmin had done much to promote better understanding and empathy among Malaysians, especially the younger generation.

She had succeeded remarkably in being the first film director to reach out to all ethnic groups through the medium.

She did so by blending romance with comedy and tragedy, but mostly by embracing the country’s cultural diversity and using the power of our rich languages, dialects and accents.

Along with it, she challenged old mindsets and exposed obvious hypocrisies.

She may be gone but there is much that we can all learn from what she has left us.

Politicians who tend to see through racially tinted eyes, need just watch her moving Petronas advertisements to open up their minds.

Compulsory screening is also highly recommended for those running the Biro Tata Negara (National Civics Bureau).

If stories related by those who had to undergo racism-tinged courses are true, Yasmin’s movies and ads might help remove the blinkers that they have been wearing.

Datuk L. Krishnan, the 87-year-old doyen of the Malaysian film industry who uncovered and nurtured the careers of early Malay film actors, including the legendary (Tan Sri) P. Ramlee, are among those in the industry who feel that a bright light had been snuffed out so suddenly.

As he put it, she ventured boldly where others would not dare to tread.

Describing her as “far ahead of the rest”, he said he would not have risked touching matters deemed too sensitive in his time.

It was a shame that many in the industry did not understand, or chose to deride, her efforts when she was alive and some are still bent on doing so by trying to mar her image.

But many Malaysians who have been profoundly touched by her work despite not knowing her personally, have been able to get an insight into what she was like through her blogs – The Storyteller (http://yasminthestoryteller.blogspot.com/) and The Storyteller, Part 2 (http://yasminthefilmmaker.blogspot.com/) on which she made her last post on July 22, three days before her untimely demise.

They know that she remained humble to the end.

In one of her recent postings, she wrote: “Today, after making about 50 television commercials and six feature-length films, after winning 11 international awards, I often feel like I don’t know the first thing about filmmaking.

“But I know this much: If your intentions are pure, if you apply your craft with a view to observe humanity and, ultimately, God himself, very often something powerful will surface.”

Strangely, just 10 days before her death, one person made an ominous posting about her being recognised only after her death.

The person wrote: “Kat Malaysia ni Kak Min, minta maaf cakaplah, kalau dah mati baru orang nak appreciate. (In Malaysia, Kak Min, sorry for saying, people are only appreciated after they die.)

“How’s Datuk Yasmin Ahmad sound to you? Probably nothing... Coz you(‘ll) probably (be) dead by then!

“Pemergiannya merupakan satu kehilangan besar pada negara. Beliau telah membuka mata kita pada erti sebenar perfileman. Bagaimana seni, penceritaan dan aspek komersil boleh bergabung menjadi satu...”

“(Her demise was a great loss to the nation. She had opened our eyes to the true meaning of film. How art, storylines and commercial aspects can be merged into one…)”

Her response was succinct: “Saya tak pernah mengejar title. Takut riak. (I have never chased titles. I fear becoming proud).”

- THE STAR

Jackson death was twittered, texted and Facebooked

"Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Jackson has just died," the woman called out breathlessly upon boarding a Manhattan bus, moments after the news had broken.

Not a word was spoken in response.

But nearly every passenger reached for a BlackBerry, a cell phone, whatever device was at hand.

"People are already texting about it, putting it up on Facebook, remembering his greatest moments," noted Delmar Dualeh, sitting in the back.

At 17, he confessed, the news didn't really move him emotionally.

He was too young to recall the 50-year-old entertainer in his prime.

But he was fully engaged in the cultural moment.

He hurried the conversation along so he could get back to texting.

In Iran, people speak of a Twitter uprising.

Was this the first major Twitter celebrity death?

Because it wasn't just HOW lots of people first learned of Jackson's demise, but what they did once they found out.

"Once you knew the news, there wasn't so much more to know - the rest is all comment," said media critic Jeff Jarvis.

So, he said, maybe you'd go to your friends instead of the news: "You might care more what your friends say than some analyst." Jarvis himself tweeted the moment he heard of the death: He noted that Iran's spiritual leader should be grateful to Jackson because the story wiped Iran off the day's news agenda.

"That was re-tweeted a lot," Jarvis said. The company said news of Jackson's death generated the most tweets per second since Barack Obama was elected president, and more than twice the normal tweets per second from the moment the story broke.

Plain old texting, Dualeh's choice, had its largest spike on AT&T's network in history. Nearly 65,000 texts per second were sent, the company said - more than 60 percent over normal volume.

And on Facebook, "sharing of all types went up - including wall posts, comments, notes, posted links," wrote spokeswoman Jaime Schopflin in an e-mail. "Status updates in particular saw an increase of more than three times the amount than usual."

Some posters were cynical, but many more were grief-stricken, like Jackson fan Scott Friedstein, an administrative assistant who lives in Brooklyn.

"There will never be another like him, ever," Friedstein wrote.

"The word 'superstar' is tossed around a lot, but no one personified the term, lived and breathed it, and delivered like he did. To all the people who liked Michael Jackson when it wasn't cool to ... I feel for you."

Facebook said there were no internal reports of the site slowing from too much traffic. But there were slowdowns or outages on other sites.

Google said the spike in searches related to Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack.

Wikipedia, meanwhile, had trouble with traffic, with people getting intermittent error messages, said Jimmy Wales, founder of the online encyclopedia.

He also described an online debate between users and regular editors over whether Jackson's death should be added to his entry before the news was officially confirmed.

Finally, editors intervened and prevented entries about Jackson from being modified for about six hours, Wales said.

On MySpace, Jackson's own profile was seeing an average of 100 new friends added per minute, the company said, and his friend total was on its way to being the site's highest increase in one day.

And Jackson's former wife, Lisa Marie Presley, posted a long, emotional statement on her own MySpace page.

"All of my indifference and detachment that I worked so hard to achieve over the years has just gone into the bowels of hell, and right now I am gutted," she wrote.

She also said Jackson had long feared dying young and tragically.

The initial news of Jackson's death broke on TMZ.com at 5:20 p.m. EDT (2120 GMT) The Los Angeles Times and then The Associated Press confirmed the death just before 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT), and networks then led their broadcasts with the news.

"TMZ is an AP customer and a good customer, but that report did not meet our standards for putting something on the AP wire," the news organization's vice president and managing editor for entertainment news, Lou Ferrara, said Friday.

TMZ turned out to be right.

But there were plenty of false reports circulating across the Web that mainstream news organizations had to chase: Rumors of actor Jeff Goldblum falling off a cliff, Harrison Ford falling off a yacht and, on Friday, George Clooney in a plane crash.

Another challenge the mainstream media faced was presenting both sides of Jackson himself, and balancing the polarities of his story.

On the one hand, there was ample video evidence of the extraordinarily gifted young man who took the world by storm, moonwalking on the Apollo Theater stage, or dancing hypnotically in the groundbreaking "Thriller" video.

On the other, there was the pale, older man, dangling his baby off a hotel balcony, or seen in video from his trial on charges of child molestation. So which Jackson to show?

"There was a duality to Michael Jackson that you had to deal with," said Susan Zirinsky, executive producer of "48 Hours" and CBS specials.

"The man died with a legacy of shame. The news had to be a combined sentence."

To open the one-hour special she produced, anchored by Harry Smith, Zirinsky chose four words that she felt conveyed the dichotomy: "A prodigy. A sensation. The controversy. The tragedy."

The same duality was evident on NBC's "Today" show, where one moment Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira were describing how Jackson was the most compelling entertainer they had ever seen.

Later, writer Maureen Orth, a guest on the show, told Lauer that Jackson had ruined the lives of families and children, and she cast doubt on the justice of his acquittal.

"But I did love his music," Orth added.

"Today" executive producer Jim Bell acknowledged it was a challenge to balance the two sides.

"But that was one of the main reasons he was such a compelling figure," Bell said.

"Otherwise, I don't know that his death would have been such a momentous occasion."

The fact that the news broke on a celebrity Web site and spread like wildfire across the social networking sites is a noteworthy change in how celebrity deaths get reported, Bell said.

But he added that the mainstream media is becoming more nimble as a result.

And, Bell added, with a huge media event such as Jackson's death, the audience is going to increase everywhere, including network TV.

"There's going to be a lot of eyeballs in both new and traditional media," Bell said.

"It's not a zero-sum game."

Maybe not, but Friedstein, the Brooklyn man, went home Thursday night and logged onto Facebook right away. He didn't turn on the TV - he doesn't even have one.

"I just wanted to see how other people were feeling," he said later by telephone.

"This was shattering, surreal even. It's my generation's version of Elvis dying."

- AP