When I was in university, I got involved in student politics, and got bitten by the politics bug. Perhaps it was natural – at a place like Cambridge, you suddenly find yourself a small fish in a big, big pond, filled with many other fishes, big and small, many of whom have grand ambitions for themselves. I remember, in my earliest days at university, visiting the room of one of my fellow Malaysian students, and noticing a copy of Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs on his bookshelf.
It is a small and flitting memory, but distinct for several reasons.
The first is that after many years of being in high school where I got ribbed often for reading too much, I had found myself in a new social environment, one in which it was almost taken for granted that everyone reads. More than that, it was an environment in which ambitious and competitive young students would often compete to see who has read what. It took a while to get used to this.
The other reason why this was so memorable was that I had finally found myself in a place where mostly everyone would have some opinion on politics, and many others would (often not-so-secretly) harbour ambitions of politics. I remember hearing, in hushed tones, of recently-graduated seniors having been recruited to become a special officer to so-and-so. I had contemporaries who were themselves scions of political dynasties, or hungry to make their own.
Of course, little did I know that coming up to university in the summer of 1997 was soon to thrust me into a world I had scarcely imagined, when the comfortable assumptions of what I thought I knew about Malaysian politics would be exploded by the arrest of Anwar Ibrahim and the rise of Reformasi.
I am old enough now to see friends in university now taking on important jobs in Cabinet, and many others over the years in the halls of government, as speechwriters, as special officers, as political operatives, as aspiring front-line politicians themselves. And of course there are many others who started out with that fire in their eyes – but later on, choosing different paths in life: corporate law, or working in MNCs, or taking up big jobs in GLCs, or investing in private equity.
What I can say, after having lived this long on this earth, and observing others and myself as we wrestle with our own individual hopes and ambitions, is that there is no one right way to live life. The years will come and go, and the fires of youthful ambition, as important as they are, are only as important as you would like them to be.
Know why you are carrying this ambition within you, and if and when you let go, know for whom and why that decision is made. For those who are still in the arena, I congratulate you and I wish you all the very best. In the end, we have nothing and no one to answer to but our own selves, and our Creator who will be waiting for us at the end of this long journey through existence.