It sort of started by me sending a response to Jamil’s earlier mail. My mail sent on 24th
Nov 2009 goes thus:
Dear Squad Jamil,
Thank you for the response and the advice. You sure would make a good diplomat. Our
Presidente gave the same advice, but, there were others who were just as fiery as I was. You
know who they are.
They say war is an extension or failure of diplomacy. In this case if there is a war involving our Squads, you know who to pick. Before that we have to send you and the Presidente. You fail you send us.
For the rest,
I would cease creating any more hostility. Unless he replied in the same manner. I would advise the others to do the same. I am not sure who gained here. Let us now prepare for 2010.
For Everybody
Listen to Taps that I forwarded to you.
Club 12/68 Forever. ( Sung to the tune of 'I will Wait Forever' by Air Supply).
Hamzah Hassan
On 24th Nov 09, Squad Jamil wrote thus:
dear squad hamzah,
enough have been said by our golfers themselves, your good self and by other (non-golfing) squad members on the subject of how we have been "cheated" of a place (4th placing) in the recent RAFOR golf. you have also, as the golf convenor, for the intake, rightly made your observations known to the organisers and MG (B) Dato Hashim has replied albeit a little too late with some lame excuses and a touch of sarcasm to boot!!! i suppose it just goes to show how immature (dah tua-tua macam ini pun masih belum wisen up!!!) they can be when dealing with complaints. your counter-reply has further fortified our observation of the lackadaisical attitude of the committee. and now that everyone who wants to be heard has made his point, i suggest we close the subject lest it gets carried away and gets mired with other issues and leaves a bad taste in the mouth in our relations with RAFOR who are, after all, our brother officers, too. i suggest we close this chapter, KIV the lessons learnt and move on.
something that really caught my attention out of this tiff is the hidden and hitherto unknown talents of our squadmates. i was amazed that you had articulated your observations and arguements so well.
the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogthe
speaking of moving on, what i had in mind is
Somehow he started with a giggle ehehehehehe. Macam pempuan pulak. Kita punya should be
HaHaHaHaHa! Anyway, here goes,
dear squad hamzah and all mates !!!!!
ehehehehehe!!!!!! i must have tertekan the send button ... my comments were not finished yet .... as i spoke with you over the phone, my letter was in fact already typed and ready to be sent as a reply in the club 1268 blog but somehow i couldn't press the right buttons to have it posted in the blog. and as i was over the phone and speaking to you, experimenting and followig your instructions on how to send .... oooops!!! the whole thing disappeared and i couldnt retrace or bactrack to it. so back to re-drafting the letter and tried as hard as i could to recall what i wrote in the original reply my pc starting giving problems which further exacerbated the recall nerves in my memory and caused a brain jam!!!... what i type in the key pad does not appear to be responsive on the screen .... i was missing letters in between words and spaces are not moving so it was a lot of frustration backtracking and checkng back on the spelling etc so much so that i couldnt concentrate on recallng what i wrote in the original reply to you (hehehehe!!!! you will notice that my letter below is hanging and also i was testing the keypad with "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" caption!!!!) even as i write now without backtracking and correcting ,this is how it would appear "the quickbwn fox jmps ver the lazydg". so i am having a hard time struggling to finish this letter as best as i could. so if there are minor sd errors please understand. so what i was trying to convey in my original reply in the blog revolved aound 3 points :
a. the first has been said already about the RAFOR golf. (i take note of your ref to clauswitz's philosophical observation that "war is an extension of politics" (after diplomacy fails) and taken note of your observations about the "hawks" and "doves"' among our squad members.
b the second point i made was that i was quite amazed that you have very good writing skills (dah tentulah kan ... u were my instructor for the sd course!!!!) only sikit bawah squad fathol kitalah (out of deferrence to him as our premier writer and owner and editor of a newspaper tau ... nah mamphui bersaing dengan dia!!!!!)
c. more importantly, i wanted to congratulate you for comig up with the club's very own blog and this is what i would like to elaborate further and invite comments from our fellow brothers and members.
the club's blog has been a long time coming and through your sole efforts you have finally made it a reality ...so my heartiest congrats to you again. well, as members of intake 12/68 we are all automaically "accepted" members of this blog ...
its OUR blog. so to all squadmates out there, lets contribute our ideas as to how best we want it to be presented/stuctured, how and who is to manage it, how can we actively contribute to it so that it does not just become a white elephant after the initial enthusiasm wears off.
for starters,i would like to suggest that maybe below the RMC logo, we should have a portrait/group picture of our intake as we were in 1968-1970. i know this can be quite challenging esp to get all of us in the photo as some had left while during training, some went off overseas to sandhurst and portsea, some joined sandhurst without going through RMC and there were yet others like me who joined the intake six months later from ssc 14. maybe one solution could be to post several of these portraits taken at different times during the training period. but that would mean another bigger problem .... have we got, among us, those photos taken at different times? members should come forward if they have those pix in their possesion
my next suggestion is an offshoot of the above, that is, a portrait of those of us who are still alive as we are today - greying hair,white hair, bald or balding, wrinkly and whethered faces, potbelly and all .... for us to compare and contrast and laugh and cry over it.
of course we must also have a picture gallery to archive and display photograhic evidences of all our activities from RMC through our career to the present. and there are the club activities that we have recorded in penang, sarawak, chiengmai, RAFOR etc etc which are presently loosely stored by individuals in their emailboxes or PCs.
squad bakar baba has taken great pains to compile personal, contact and family details of all members since the turn of the last century (my my does that not make it sound like we are THAT old????) in hard copy which could also be downloaded into the blog for easier updating, storage and access.
the blog can also be effectively used as the platform for passing info, call for meetngs, results of acivites, post mortems and anything that need to be conveyed to all under current postings.
in fact, gentlemen, the sky is the limit in terms of its usage. but please remember that it can be as useful only if the members want to make it so.
so on behalf of the president and esp squad hamzah, i would like to invite each and every
squadmate to support this blog and be an active contributor.
regards
jamil rais
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