Surprises at the MIB Forum

The MIB forum organised by the titled persons of Brunei for His Majesty a couple of nights ago was interesting in many ways. I know many of you who were not at the UBD Chancellor's Hall think that you have already seen one MIB Conference, this one would be just like that. Surprisingly, no. There were a few things that I found very interesting despite the forum ending at about 12.10 am.

The first was to see a real life Prince, the Crown Prince of Perak talked about the institution of the monarchy. He is a scholar having his first degree from Oxford and his Masters and PhD from Harvard. I met him when I was there and he was a down to earth man. I remembered he introduced himself as Nazrin when I met him in Cambridge about 10 years ago (Cambridge is the name of the town in Massachussetts where Harvard University is located - the name is copied from the Cambridge in UK) and he refused to have any sort of formality. During the MIB conference, he delivered his paper with panache with a very scholarly attitude and his speech and language .... man, I wish I can write and speak like that.

The content itself was interesting and to any ruling royals in the world, very 'insaf'ing, if there is such a word - you can only rule if the public let you and when you rule, you have to rule well. He said that at the begining of the 15th century, there were some 300 ruling dynasties and by the end of the 2nd world war, we were down to a handful. Most have disappeared along the way. Those that survived adapted and basically ruled well to remain in existence. It was a paper that could only be written and said by a prince to his fellow princes. He shed tears towards the end. The emotion of being allowed to be open and to talk about one's own destiny was at the end of the day, overwhelming. [The full speech is available on the main bruneiresources website.]

The other papers admittedly were run of the mill and very straight to the point as they have been said in the past. They were actually interesting but after more than an hour of listening to the fantastic keynote address by Raja Nazrin, they were really outclassed. Though the Malaysian Professor was interesting in a way but I couldn't remember much of what he said. But for a Chinese Professor, he was able to see it from a non-Malay perspective and for that it was in itself unusual. Judge Hayati gave the normal run of the Constitution and how the royalty was part of that Constitution. However, she was able to attract everyone's attention when she talked, or rather she called out (loudly and clearly), that the time is right for women to be included in the Legislative Council and not just the present 29 all-men LegCo. All the ladies present and men too clapped very loudly. The camera was not unfortunately focused onto the main man, I really wanted to see what his reaction was.

Another surprise awaited for me at the steps of the hall. I was standing next to a Deputy Minister, both of us waiting for our cars to come pick us up, when he said to me something about what you young bloggers are up to nowadays. Apparently he is an avid reader of Brunei blogs. Well, Dato, I am about a dozen years younger, I guess young is relative. To most Bruneian bloggers, I am old. But it is interesting that the Deputy Minister acknowledges the existence of bloggers and so for you young bloggers out there, your serious stuff writings are read by the policy makers. I do know of a few extremely senior people who read my stuffs but on official relationship, I don't talk about it and therefore we pretend I don't write blogs. But you will be surprised who else reads your stuffs. That's an avenue for you to explore.