The Shared History of Two Southeast Asian Tigers’ is for those keen on history and who want to relish a good book that tries to provide relevant information. Hale is a British author and documentary producer based in Singapore from 2013 to 2017 (as executive producer for Channel News Asia).

OMG! : To look at our past , clear-eyed, seeing everything and minimizing nothing, warts and all, is the beginning of wisdom. The Malay intelligentsia especially after 1969, has concocted a structure that positions them as the bumiputra or original inhabitants.

It is transparently false, since the Orang Asli are the ancient people here. "Bumiputra" is the brief loincloth covering the nakedness of the invented lie. Every now and then, that which is hidden, peeps out innocently, as in the stone tombs in Kedah and other archeological findings in Johor.

All must be hastily covered up! With this invented status dating from 1969, they are always anxious about their legitimacy. Like they know they don't deserve this exalted thing.

They are not princes, after all. Just another type of imposter. They won't like Hale's book. Expect lots of carping critiques from Malay Professors society and the like, soon.

Dummies Dhimmi : Notably the obliteration of Munshi Abdullah is the a sad episode by a racist political segment. All the good he did, as in re-inventing a jumbled up creole, into a usable language should have made him into a super historical hero.

Yet he is being denigrated because he is was Tamil from south India. These pea brained people are still at it, re-writing history trying to make moles into mountains.

Aisyalam : They are trying to build a master race that was coined by our colonialists.

MarioT : Our history has gone through much fabrication and distortment to present a false picture of glory and achievements of a single race.

Whatever is written of the past, depicting British colonial rule and the laborious sacrifices and contributions made by the Indians and Chinese in carving a nation that stood well recognised in the world by its major exports of rubber, copra and tin, is never given much publicity in the Malay history books used by our present education system.

Whatever is written of the true historical events of the past of the country, is only an English language presentation while the translation in Malay to give a glimpse of our true and unadulterated history to the majority race, is suppressed.

Our history though may still get new insights or serve as reminders of our past, it may just be treated as another book of unimportant events by the group that controls and disseminates our past history.

Proarte : You are so wrong. The Malay race and their history as we know it, is a British construct. Malay indigeneity, their privileges and religion were defined by the British. They were created to serve the British commercial interests.

It is the Malays who should be thankful to the British for giving them a privileged status. The Chinese and Indians worked hard for what they achieved. To this day, the constitution defines Malays illogically to be Muslim.

They cease to be Malay if they renounce their faith, contradicting the supposed Constitutional guarantees of freedom of worship. I sincerely hope Madani Malaysia will iron out these constitutional anomalies.

The British portrayed Munshi Abdullah as a local Malay scholar and this was the case in our history books until recently when the truth became known that Munshi Abdullah was in actual fact a Tamil Muslim immigrant from India.

If Malays care to delve into their historical roots, they would find a vast majority of them like Munshi Abdullah have foreign ancestry. Scarecrow, assuming you are a constitutional Malay, your foreign ancestry should not be something for you to hide or be ashamed of, but instead should be celebrated and shout from the rooftops.