Work hard and you will succeed
By Grateful Rakyat
From The Sunday Star
I AM writing to state my and my children’s stand on Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad and beg to differ from the letters by James Tan and Mohd Ghazali Osman (The Star, May 22)
I was born in 1944 and had to go through what other parents and their children had to go through in those days, living hand to mouth day to day and not knowing when our next meal would be.
I had to walk 10km to and back from school every day because we could not afford the 10-cent fare on a rickety bus.
And that only after going around the village shouting 'kuih-kuih, nasi lemak' over and over again until I had covered all the houses in the village.
Even during my secondary school days I had to go to the coffee shops to place my mom's nasi lemak and kuih on the towkays' tables and collect the unsold ones for lunch.
Sometimes I had to walk to the kedai runcit in the rain or the hot sun a kilometre away just to buy 5 cents worth of salt, or sugar, or ikan bilis, because that was all we could afford with my dad's income of about $1 a day as a petition writer.
In 1959 I was chosen to study in the Malay College, Kuala Kangsar, but unable to as we could not afford the $60 per term fees. I had to work after finishing Form 5 at $122.50 a month to help support my parents.
Then Allah gave us Tun Dr Mahathir.
The last three of my seven children got their degrees from ITM. Two of them are doing well in private cleaning services because of the infrastructure made available. I don't have to be a crony to be a successful retired businessman.
Anyone can be a millionaire in Malaysia if one tries hard enough.
Don't try to compare anyone to Dr Mahathir. No one can ever come close enough, not in a million years.
This is one heack of a beautiful letter.
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