Malay College Class of 2004

IT was indeed a fitting climax to the year-long 100th anniversary celebrations of the Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK) last night.

The royal gala dinner at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre was easily the most ecstatic and the most well-attended gathering of old boys in recent years.

Four Malay Rulers attended. And it appeared as if this was the largest gathering of chief executive officers and senior corporate figures ever to have taken place under one roof.

Nothing elitist about the whole affair though, just a group of former students coming together to commemorate the centenary and, for some, the chance to be boys once again for the evening.

In fact, heavy nostalgia and acting like boys are things many of us who grew up in MCKK look forward to at every old boys' (MCOBA) annual dinner which would always include full-scale stage shows similar to concerts held at the school of yesteryear.

Last night, for instance, the old boys put up a definitive Broadway-type musical tracing the story of MCKK from its founding moment to the present.

It also included a re-enactment of the ceremony where the Malay Rulers declared that the school was a national heritage and would be under the royal patronage of the Conference of Rulers "for as long as the sun, moon and stars move across the heavens".

It was an extraordinary show put up by a group of amateurs who in the day are financial consultants, engineers, surgeons, architects or hold other regular jobs.

The musical was directed by multi-talented Datuk Sallehuddin Hashim, a respected corporate troubleshooter.

And all this reflects the multitude of talents acquired in school that remain hidden, surfacing only on occasions like last night's function.

Indeed it has to be noted that some of these extraneous talents have literally blown up in the face, like that of Azahari Hussin, the "Demolition Man", the detonation expert believed to be the mastermind behind some of the bomb attacks in Bali and Jakarta over the last three years .

Yes, Azahari, the region's most wanted man shot dead in East Java a fortnight ago, was an MCKK student.

A story that appeared in this paper four days after he was killed said, among other things:

"He loved the outdoors and often hitchhiked... from the premier Malay College Kuala Kangsar, where he studied, to Jasin, his hometown."

Going by records, Azahari was three years my junior in MCKK which means we were there at about the same time for a couple of years.

But I cannot recall him in college, which is a bit strange actually because MCKK was, and still is, a small community of about 600-odd students at any one time. Hence everybody knows everybody.

Anyway, it was quite sad to read about Azahari going down "in a hail of bullets".

Sadder still to learn that he was one of those responsible for the deaths of many innocent people in the name of what he and many others like him call jihad.

Apparently, Azahari acquired most of his skills in explosives when he spent some time with the separatist movement in southern Philippines and liberation forces in Afghanistan.

Some MCKK old boys say they would not be surprised if the seeds of these skills were acquired on his own in chemistry and physics experiments in the school science labs.

Azahari, the explosives expert, it is said, mixed low-explosive and high-explosive materials to make bombs, used everyday stuff like petrol, kerosene, soap and detergents.

Yes, soap. When the explosives are detonated, the bars of laundry soap attached to containers of inflammable liquid (mostly petrol) are said to create a fireball effect of the potent combination of sodium and fatty acids in the soap.

This will severely burn the victims very much like the napalm bombs used by America in its war in Vietnam more than 30 years ago.

Since I cannot remember Azahari in school, I asked some of his classmates what he was like in MCKK and all of them said he was just one of the boys, with nothing extraordinary in his character to distinguish him from the rest.

He was not the kind of nerdy loner you often read about who turns into a wicked villain later in life. Neither was he a rotten scoundrel written off by everyone.

But he always rose to the occasion in studies, according to his peer Nik Nor Rozaidi, better known as Nik Ron.

"He was the only one in our class (Form Five Science III) to get a scholarship to do matriculation in Australia."

And one thing his friends remember him most was his passionate following of Hong Kong martial arts movie star Bruce Lee who was a cult figure among the young in the early 1970s.

"He never missed a Bruce Lee movie and sometimes even moved like the late actor," says Nor Hashim Sulaiman, another of his classmates.

That, perhaps, also explained why he was a very committed member of the MCKK Silat Club, a very popular Malay martial arts association among students those days.

He also had a ruthless streak, according to his friends.

There was one occasion at a silat initiation ceremony, recalls Nik Ron, where Azahari beat up his opponent almost to a pulp until he had to be restrained.

Azahari was also a champion sprinter who represented the school in the 100-metre and 200-metre events.

But almost all of his close friends say they least expected his life to turn out the way it did.

"When we learned a few years ago that he was involved in terror activities and was behind some of the bombings in the region, we couldn't believe it," says Nik Ron. "It was as if he was forced into it."

Most of Azahari's peers say he was wrong in choosing the path, abandoning his family to fight a cause which led to the killing of innocent people and eventually his own death.

But, oddly enough, there are yet some people, whom I met lately, who seem to regard Azahari as a hero — someone, they say, who should be saluted for being utterly committed to a struggle.

And when they are reminded that it was this same man who had killed dozens or probably hundreds of innocent people, the reply was so curt:

"Well, those killed were merely collateral damage. The Americans had a lot to show for this in Iraq and Afghanistan."

This is the sort of logic I will never understand. And we are talking about the lives of innocents.

But, whichever way you look at Azahari and his misadventures, it was all a big shock because MCKK students, especially in the old days, were never known to be racial or religious fanatics despite their being in an all-Malay all-Muslim environment.

Most of the teachers, for one, were non-Malays and there were absolutely no barriers whatsoever between them and the students.

One of the teachers I remember so well was a Mr M. Nadarajah who taught me English when I was in the lower forms.

A chain-smoker, he was more than a teacher; he was part of the school family, helping the students in many extra-curricular activities and organising stage shows.

Nadarajah made learning English fun and so simple, teaching us about sentence construction and making us understand what "subject and predicate" was all about and what an adjectival clause was.

Somehow, when I was thinking a lot about him a few days ago, I stumbled across a telephone number through which he could be contacted. I called.

Apart from a voice that was a little bit deeper, "Mr Nadarajah", as we all called him, sounded very much like he did 35 years ago.

He couldn't recall me when I introduced myself because it was so long ago and he had taught so many students in his 25 years at MCKK. And he is 71 years old now.

I thanked him profusely for all the things he had taught me, telling him that they had all come in useful in the job that I am doing.

The typical Nadarajah (he had the neatest chalk handwriting on the blackboard) that he was, he said he was glad that I had called and added that it was only his job to do all the things he did for us.

We exchanged some old stories for a while after which he said: "My best years were in MCKK."

And he still smokes.

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