TUNKU ABDUL RAHMAN AND HOW I GOT TO STUDY AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN NEW YORK CITY AND THE DOCUMENTARIES, 'THE RESIDENCY YEARS' AND 'TAKING SHADE UNDER IVY LEAVES' I PRODUCED…

By Mansor bin Puteh.

What has the official visit of Prime Minister and Bapa Kemerdekaan Tunku Abdul Rahman to Canada to get technicians from the Canadians to help establish our first television station which was established on 28 December 1963, got to do with me who  finally got to study at Columbia University in New York City? 

The truth is: Tunku had to seek assistance from the Canadians to help Malaysia establish our first television station which was then based in Jalan Ampang in Kuala Lumpur. He did not seek support from the British Broadcasting Center (BBC) because he did not find it fit to get the British who he said he had just caused to leave Malaya to gain our independence from.

And for that reason Tunku also did not see it fit for him to be driven in any British-made car such as the Bentleys, Roll-Royces or Jaguars as his official vehicles and chose instead American-made vehicles such as the Cadillacs.

However, the freedom fighter of Burma, Aaun San, did it in a more dramatic way after his country gained independence from Britain, when he changed the driving system in his country so now the Burmese are driving on the other side of the road.

Burma, now Myanmar is the only other country in the Asean region which follows this type of driving system with the Philippines as the other country. This was because they were under America for a long time and they just followed the driving system in America, till today.

After visiting Canada, Tunku and his entourage went to Washington, DC where he was welcomed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Lady Byrd and other senior officials of the Johnson Administration at the White House for an official visit to America, after which he went to New York City and stayed at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue.

President Johnson had earlier made an official visit to Malaysia as did his vice president Spiro Agnew including Richard Nixon and Robert Kennedy and his elder brother, John F Kennedy. 

He brought with him his nephew and adopted son, Syed Abdullah Barakhbah who became his unofficial photographer who took photos of the Tunku and family at the official residency of the Prime Minister called The Residency which was at the very end of Jalan Dato' Onn.

And when they returned to Malaysia after the visit, Syed Abdullah visited my father and my family and he gave me some Pan American Airlines catalogues. In the catalogues I saw for the first time photos of the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty in New York City. I was attracted to them and told myself that I would one day go to the city.

But I didn't realize that it had to take fifteen years before I finally managed to step foot on New York City - and as student working on a Master of Fine Art in Film Directing in the fall of 1978? 

Actually I gained admission at Columbia to study there in the fall of 1977 when I was still in my final year studying at the School of Mass Communication, Mara Institute of Technology. 

But my application for a Mara scholarship was rejected because the Mara officials then said, they 'did not want Malay students to study at such universities'.

It took me a long while before I realized that I had been accepted to study in such a university called the Ivy League universities which are the most prestigious universities in America. There are eight of them - Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth and UPenn.

So I was forced to work as a reporter with Utusan Melayu where I had gone to do my practical training there. And during the time I was there I managed to file an appeal with Mara who finally offered me a study loan, so I was off to Columbia in the fall of 1978.

If not for Tunku and Syed Abdullah who is my brother-in-law, I doubt it if I would want to go to New York City to study and might end up at a university somewhere in America such as Texas or Ohio, which were going to offer me a place to study film, but which rejected it, but after I got the acceptance by Columbia.

How could an Ivy League university accept me to study at their university while the four or five other non-descript universities in America reject my application to study there?

And as my show of respect for Tunku I produced a special documentary on him and his family when they were living at The Residency Years using photos of him and his family taken by Syed Abdullah when they were living in The Residency.

And I produced another documentary on the experiences of some Malaysians who had studied at the Ivy League universities called 'Taking Shade Under Ivy Leaves' when I also got to talk with our former Secretary to the Government, Tun Ahmad Sarji who talked about his childhood in Perak who never thought how one day he would end up studying at Harvard, and some other scholars like the others who I also interviewed and profiled in my documentary. 

It turned out to be Tun Ahmad's last interview which was recorded, because he died when I was still editing the documentary after he was hospitalized for more than one month due to a covid-19 infection. 

It is too bad that it had to happen because I was thinking of having a special preview of the documentary with him attending. 

Other than that, I also tried to work on a novel on Tunku when he went to England to study starting with the time when he is studying in Bangkok with the title of 'The Malayan Prince' at the age of sixteen in 1919 and immediately after the end of the First World War, and turn it into a screenplay for possible production as a film for international release.