Malabar To Malaya

Author : Ravindran Raghavan
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 100 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (233 download)

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Download or read book Malabar to Malaya written by Ravindran Raghavan and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is my journey through life since 1965. My grandfather might say that this is an untold story of a Malayalee immigrant from Malabar who migrated to Malaya (now called Malaysia) in search of a better future and never to return for 3 generations! The lost social network of one generation led to the lost roots of our entire family tree.My first ancestor, my great-grandpa, landed in Malaya in 1902 followed by my two grandpa and one grandma who came when the British were ruling Malaya. They would not have guessed that it was going to be a one-way journey out of home. None of them ever went back to their homeland nor saw their siblings, family or village ever again.The Japanese invasion of Malaya in 1940 (until 1944) during the Second World War further disrupted the ties to India. By the end of the war, my dad and his family has shifted from a rubber plantation (Wessington Estate, now called Simpang Renggam Estate) to their paddy field house in Simpang Renggam and finally to the plantation where we lived thereafter.I was born in a plantation house (not a hospital) and my birth certificate was "processed" in a police station. My birth certificate states my place of birth as "barrack Lambak Estate". That is how I arrived earth in 1965.I grew up in a rubber plantation, Lambak Estate in Kluang (state of Johore) owned by Guthrie Ropel Berhad, a British plantation company. I soon to became an unpaid under-aged labour helping my parents tap rubber trees starting at 04:30 in the morning amongst the mosquitoes and snakes; smacking into spider webs between the trees and getting my socks soaked with water from the wet bushes surrounding the rubber trees.Our dining table starts with a perfect setting after pay-day and dwindles into a lack of food by end of the month. The vicious cycle seems to never end year after year.I went to Tunku Mahmood School in Kluang and then to Sekolah Tinggi Kluang (i.e. Kluang High School). Fortunately, in the years to come, I graduated as a Chemical Engineer from University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur and that changed our "fate" by placing food on our table consistently. As I set sail on my career, my life took various positive turns that brought me to be a Company Director, occasionally signing cheques with six digits in them (in Malaysian Ringgit!).I must thank the Malaysian government that gave affordable education, health care and a great economy that helped me climb through these steps of life.As I look out of my office window on the 33rd Floor of Latifa Tower, Dubai, I see that it took me 7 hours to travel 5,236 km on Emirates flight EK347 to get here ... but it took me many million hours to crawl out of the poverty that I was born into.This book shares some of the turbulent and smooth parts of my journey that took me through episodes of pain, gain, glory and gratification.