Saturday, June 13, 2009

An observation from one KI-Media Reader

Dear KI-Media,

We would like to bring to your attention the astute observation provided by one of our anonymous readers. We would like to thank "Khmer Academy" for this constructive observation.

KI-Media team

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Fellow Khmers,

As most of you, I consider KI blog as a medium for me to stay connected with our fellow citizens and to be informed of the current affaires in Cambodia. There is however another reason, the most important one, for my regular visits at KI blog – to observe and study the trend, the intellectual and mental capacities, the progress and the evolution of Khmer society in general.

My general impression so far is that our people still have a lot of works to catch up. Although we have received better and more advanced education and can express ourselves in English with different levels of proficiency, we have not made much progress in term of problem solving capacity. We are still very heavily influenced by the traditional - and most of the times - emotional ways of addressing a particular issue. If our nation is to survive and be able to face the present and future challenges, we must work harder and smarter, and start to see the world as what it really is, not as what it appears to be or what we wish it to be...

Recently I visited a Vietnamese blog as I want to know where they are compared to us. And just to give you an idea of what they are talking about, how they talk to each other and what their philosophy is …etc, here is a fragment of an article from their blog. I leave it to you to make your own impression. However, I strongly urge you to consider this fragment of article as a personal challenge to surpass. We were once a great nation and we can be it again if we chose to.

Khmer Academy
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“… I walk around Vietnam and see a teenage child, in denial that its parents recently divorced. So much potential, yet confused about how to achieve all it wants to. Horrible scars from the fighting, covered up by adopting everything superficial as quickly as possible--hot motorbikes, fashion, sexual liberation.

Granted, I'm living in Ho Chi Minh City, and it's more western and liberal than the rest of Vietnam. However, it still influences Vietnam through its money and presence on tv.

You cannot blame the older generation for constantly reliving such a trying time, nor for the youth to naturally gravitate to that which satisfies their worldly appetites. All you can hope for, is that sometime, somewhere, the grandchildren of those who lived through the war will understand the role the Indochine wars played in shaping their country, take from their grandparents a healthy dose of realism and respect for death, take from their parents hope and zest for life, and become the Vietnam that ….

Posted by: Triet | February 10, 2006 at 11:53 AM

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

i fell this is an article not emotional or express of their felling or we could say a real common. to me it seems like very smooth article not emotional felling. not something that express from deeb inside out.

Anonymous said...

Because the aticles posted in KI-Media are mostly incendiary, subjective, and misleading. Therefore, the comments would adequatly correspond to the subjects.

So simple.

Anonymous said...

KI-Media is very biased. I read when I want to know what the oppossition need to say about something.

Anonymous said...

To 9:16AM

So what are you trying to say? What about CTN or all the pro-government media and don't they practice bias toward the opposition by publishing false information and propaganda? Tell me of one article that is not bias toward the opposition promoted by AH HUN SEN state run media!

If you want to blame KI-media for being bias than you blame Voice of America Khmer(VOA), The Phnom Penh Post,Khmer Sthapana newspaper,Associated Press,Huffington Post (USA),Reuters,AFP,TNA,DPA,Clear Path International - USA,Xinhua,BangkokPost,Post-Bulletin (Rochester, Minnesota)...


You must be living in a dreamland for you to say such a nonsense!

Anonymous said...

In relations to above remarks,all can be summed up is "it takes one to know one."

It's an intellectual and social disease known as personality cult that Cambodia politicos inherited from post colonial era.

Viet Nam is an emerging nation like Siam which displays ambition and profiteer attitude to bind its extrovert mixed culture to create its own.

Other hand Cambodia is living in the past and introvert in vision,creed and cultural attitude whcih mostly displays its low esteem and inferiority scars.

Thinking as an esteemed Cambodia one must think as what I can do to be an esteemed Cambodian first.The rest will follow.

Anonymous said...

Cambodia? Why compare Cambodia to Thailand and Vietname? Cambodia doesn’t have 70 to 80 million people?

This is not the issue of esteem for Cambodia or Cambodian people! This real issue here is that Cambodia and Cambodian people are facing is the old habit and the old way of doing thing!

The fucken corruption, the family tie, the cronyism, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, society divided among the have and the have not, no national interest, monopoly...

From a distance, Cambodia seems like a new country with a new beginning. The fact is Cambodia has a new beginning but with an outdated knowledgeable leaders to manage Cambodia in a manner that can compete with the rest of the world! In the meantime, Cambodian people will have to wait until these old farts die out so the new generation can change the way of doing thing for the better. The real nightmare is that the new generation still adopting the old habit and the old way of doing from their parent and Cambodia will cease to exist as a country!

Anonymous said...

12:06 AM,

Who has said that the members of the new generation "still adopting the old habit and old way?"

Maybe a few of them but not ALL. My friend, let me tell you that MOST new members of the new generation do things in a completely different way of thinking from the past. I think you can see clearly how those new members of the new generation adopt new way of thinking by having higher education: some are lawyers, engineers, docs, savvy computer scientists, new politicians... They are young, smart and beautiful! And some are rrreally SOPHISTICATED!!!!

This is how the new members of the new generation think and do things... You see what I meant by doing and adopting new way of thinking...?

Long live the new members of the new generation of Cambodia!! And may God bless Cambodia and her people!

From an old member of the old generation but proud to support the new way of thinking of the new generation.

Anonymous said...

I agree with the theory that the new generation will do thing differently from the old generation.

The incumbent leaderships have outdated knowledge depent largely on where you compare to. If compared to international standards, Yes they do. But if compared to the rest in Cambodia, particularly to those survived from the KR, they have better knowledge.

Knowledge of management has to be practical and fit into the situation ranther the fancy one but fail to realise the actual requirements.

Look at Funcipic Party, what did they do at the begining? They gathered all the Western educated intellectuals to hold their every government post. And now almost all of them have departed and jointed CPP. Not even that, they also start learning from CPP about the tactics of government. SRP could be an example.

KR distroyed virtually every infrastructure, inlcuding human resources-the most valuable thing.

To govern a country full of illiteracy and mostly farmers, it need leaderships who understand the life farmers, understand the good side of them and the negative side.

Western educateds at this stage still have a wide gap to the grass root. How many of them have failed so far? The modern management styles will only be practical to deal with modern society. Cambodia simply has not reached that level. We have to wait until those uneducated survived from
KR have passed away.

No any politics could quickly eredicate those problems without causing social unrest. Thus CPP would still be the desireable one, at least at the moment.

Anonymous said...

thank you. we all can do better here. please learn from everyone in the world. like they say, education has no boundary. please don't be ashame to learn from everybody in the world as we are not perfect; no body is perfect. god bless cambodia and all our beautiful khmer people and citizens.

Anonymous said...

Although I can empathize with your view, 5:22, I completely disagree with your interpretation of the right time for change. The idea that the right time for change is to wait for all the bad elements to die out, I think is a self-defeating attitude idea. When in a society are all the bad elements ever going to die out? Not even a purge like Pol Pot's fanaticism could even create a such a utopia.

Change is always now, we should always hold ourselves responsible for our own well-being- physically, socially, and economically and that means we also have to responsible as citizen. We must elect officials that have progressive thinking and bring us real economic stability and peace, not peace through threats and instilling fear in us.

The time for change as Obama said for his country was now. There is no better time for change then present moment.

And it for those who believe that dreaming is a bad introverted attitude, they have not completely assess the importance of dreams.

It is through dreams, that pioneers got their visions. It is through dreams that changes happen.

We must be able to see our country and the world around us for the way it is, but that said, we must also be able to dream of what we liked our world and country to be like. It is only then that we can change. Because all changes began with a vision and a dream.

If we wait for a perfect opportunity to create a perfect world, the day will never come. I can assure you that the earth before we can ever achieve that.

Change is never done, even with new generations who have better ideas, newer generations after that will have to invent and adopt even better ideas to deal with the situation of their time. If change is some definite, a one time patch, apply and done then we can wait for the those old out-dated leaders to die out, but I argue and I'm sure most people are with on the this, that change is and will always be the new trend, then, we must act now.

Just think, do you want our next new generation to wait until we're all dead to implement a change to our society that we could also benefit?

The resistance to change will be there, but the drive and will towards a better future should not stop at the foot of those resistance.

Change is Now.

Anonymous said...

i think the sit and wait attitude is a cowardly act. history has shown time and again, it failed. it's like what lord buddha advised people in his teaching: to expect no suffering is like looking for a needle in the hay stack; to expect pure perfection is likewise. i think striving for the so-called balance or equilibrium or in medicine they called it homeostasis. i'm no expert but i understand a lot.

Anonymous said...

Wait and see....Be complacent and just let Cambodia's fate take its course, then Khmer will be wiped out from the face of this planet earth, you all want that?

ROFL! (Thai and Viet boys laughing)