Good Luck for SPM (and Life!)

I had planned to call Pojan and Shahir for quite a while, since by comparison they could have been the worst treated senior debaters in the last seven years. Things did not work too well with the establishment and more often than not, they stood their ground. In the process, many incidents that in my opinion were not fair happened and we were not there to back them up (or cheer them up, the way we used to). They cannot be blamed if they feel they were abandoned.

I made a decision at one point to risk severing the relationship that we had with the boys for the bigger picture. Along the way, many people paid the price and one of the groups most affected was these boys.

Usually before they go for their SPM, they would have received cards and postcards wishing them good luck. Their batch would have gone through a full weekend's worth of scholarship and career workshop - outlining the steps and possibilities they will encounter once they leave the school. In previous years, we even made occasional visits just to cheer the boys and distracted them from the pressure of SPM.

Pojan and Shahir did not get any of that, though they deserve every bit of it. Even the SMS became very occasional as we all move on in different directions.

Overwhelmed by a sense of guilt (and the need to retain some portion of the past as we move forward in life), I made a call to both of them last night (ha ha partly to entertain me in the massive balik kampung jam).

So much has changed. The school has changed. The few people who were instrumental in the collage of memories for the last 7 years would have moved on too.

Most importantly, Pojan and Shahir will move on too.

But there was an air of optimism about everything.

There were a few good news from MCKK. The boys seemed to be a lot more at ease with the new openness and hassle-free approach (and I hope the information and updates I receive have been accurate). The Form 3 batch managed to get a 3rd rank in the whole SBP based on their PMR-trial; so hopefully we'll hear some good news by the year end. The Form Five was ranked 12th (according to them) based on the SBP trial, also the best so far (the best result since 2004, if I can recall, was 2006's at 18th). I just hope they don't screw up the way we did when the trial results were very encouraging (somehow MCKK boys have the tendency).

The rest of the chats were about them (for once). Shahir wants to do economics and all geared for it. Pojan will be taking the accounting route and will end up in the UK (that's his plan). With both planning to be in the UK, the debaters family will have quite a gathering in 2-3 years down the line (note: their career decision has got nothing to do with me or others ha ha, though of late we only produced one engineer and two doctors, the rest are all economists, accountants or lawyers ha2).

Anyway I wish them (and Class of 2010) good luck.

You will have an opportunity to finally fly away and choose the path of your life, as you like it. Choose carefully and responsibly as there are cause and effects for everything we do in life. Make us proud and come back as responsible citizens who know where our place in the society is.

Our time is up and by now we can only watch from afar.

But there's a thing called telephone :-), so always pick it up when you need to revisit the past.