Okay so end of Feb, we had the retreat in Melaka which got the consensus of starting a voter education campaign called UndiMalaysia! (now known as UndiMsia!).

Then Central Market does Art For Grabs & KL Alternative Book Fest, and UndiMsia! had a 2 hour slot to do something. Some crazy fellers decided to do a a mock by-election between Let’s Go Parti and Parti All Night Long. Bunyi best. Sounds senang kan?

Tak dapat jack….

What it entailed:

  • a few many meetings to identify issues, approach, parties, candidates, campaign and co-ordination teams, props,
  • drafting one manifesto (only one because one contender just went with a smear campaign, so no need manifesto)
  • preparing our booth and information to disseminate
  • cari kompang untuk buat kecoh
  • promoting it like gila

So our slot was at 6pm. That meant, as my friend said, from the moment the event started at noon, the people campaigned non-stop. When one team was busy making a lot of noise, meeting the rakyat, another team distributed pictures of the opponent shaking hands with Ahmedinejad. I know it might be unethical to say this, but well done to the campaign team …

At 6 + we started with Wong Chin Huat, pretending to be Christopher Wan from SPR to moderate the two candidates, Syahredzan Johan and Azmyl Yunor. While the two looked quite the opposite, the blessing was that they were talking at the same level: crap. The crap you’d laugh at and other times go huh?

Tackling issues, sometimes they made a whole lot of good fun with their answers by giving silly responses or mocking real life situations, other times they were making perfect sense with intelligent answers tackling the issues as a responsible candidate.

The debate, someone did say it was too long. That’s what she said. And I agree …

But it did get to bring out a number of interesting things that we would like to see, just maybe some fine-tuning a bit-lah so we can be a bit more concise next time.

After that, I presented my slides to the audience … in the dark.

It was somewhat about UndiMsia! but mainly putting forth that there’s a movement on the ground for something like this to happen, and we’re part of the progression, part of the many Malaysians moving towards making it more organised, actionable so that we get closer to seeing a tangible change; instead of just chit-chat at the mamak, and then writing a blog post or a note on a FB page.

P/S: Azmyl with his populist (and not quite practical) approach won against (what I felt) was the reasonably responsible Syah by about 15 votes. Congrats to both of you, I’m glad this wasn’t for real. Videos of the event hereSelamat maju negara!

Anyhow, before I go for my tehtarik, do Like UndiMsia! and be part of this by emailing us your details at [email protected] and we will take it from there! It’ll take sometime to move things yes, but we’re making it happen for sure. And it’ll happen faster, if you join us and stop making excuses of why you shouldn’t. We are out on Twitter @UndiMsia too.

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