The Social Network

The social network started not in Silicon Valley, but in Kinta Valley, circa 1970. It's actually founded at the old Tiger Lane in Ipoh. In the students toilet on the ground floor of the main building of Sekolah Tuanku Abdul Rahman (Star), to be exact. The early form was primitive and hand-operated, not digital and real-time, and certainly not as elegant as, say, Facebook or Staroba.Org. But it’s a social network nonetheless, at least in idea, concept and purpose. I'll never know who actually started it, but it's not too late to initiate another lawsuit against Zuckerberg.

Like all great discoveries and inventions, it started rather fortuitously, a serendipitous outcome of widespread anger, rebellious spite and mindless creativity. I’m not sure why and how, but a reign of terror suddenly descended on the good school. Was it the new Headmaster? Or the new head-boy? Or the groovy teacher from Texas with lush sideburns? Nobody knew. Prefects were running riot, enforcing all petty and pretty rules and regulations with an unprecedented fervour and ferocity. Students were rounded up and sent to DC and hard labour for the merest of misdemeanours, like late for debates or switching off lights at 10.35 or knowingly growing sideburns.

My heart bled for the offenders because inter-house English debates those days were only slightly more exciting than watching the matron. (Some debaters even spoke in heavy Kelantanese). For two long hours, you’d to listen to underage boys arguing heatedly on the stage about mundane matters like why “Intermarriage should be encouraged”. I mean, who cared? Why didn’t they round up and detain these deadhead debaters instead? But law is law. Love it or loathe it, you’d to sit through debates. You break the law, we break your leg, the head-boy gently reminded us. Man, how he walked the talk.

Naturally the hawkish stance didn’t go down very well with almost everyone outside the prefects room, not least the kind matron, whose sick bay was suddenly swamped with nervous wrecks. The fun-loving and trendy types were distraught now that their high life was in the cross-hairs. To be fair, they had a pretty strong case. Even without prefect brutality and excesses, life in general was already miserable with compulsory cross-country, Jack Palance movies, and those monster meals dished out by the cooks and crooks in the dining hall. Everyone was crying for breathing space. A bit of fun and merry-making should go a long way.

The prefects were roundly scorned, and sneered at the slightest opportunity. I felt for some of them who must confront their conscience and the dreaded dilemma: turn in the offenders or turn the other way. It pained and tore them because, deep down, they knew that these petty criminals were nothing more than misguided show-offs and small-time crooks not worthy of anybody’s salt. A slap on the wrist should suffice. But for every heart of gold, there’s a heart of coal lurking in the dark corridors. For the latter variety, they stuck and triumphed with the break-your-leg business model.

One of the leg-breakers was a good friend (I’m still proud of this association). No, I won’t name him here, just to get you guessing. So let’s call him my Friend. My Friend was the embodiment of a perfect prefect, easily the best in the entire Kinta Valley. Serious, smart and straight, the only sport he played was, be afraid, chess. Chess! You may argue that chess, like debates, is not a sport. Let’s not discuss this here.

Every now and then, pitched battles broke out between the two warring sides: law breakers versus leg breakers. For passive and fine-looking bystanders like me, the sight of the toned-up and browbeating law breakers could be unnerving. They’re football prodigies and rugby nutcases by day who turned serial smokers and bouncers when night fell. But the prefects were no sissies either. Most were star athletes on steroids: hurdlers, javelin launchers, triple jumpers and, don’t forget, one aspiring chess grandmaster. Fire, decidedly, must be fought with fire.

Spoils of the showdowns sometimes spilled over into the morning assemblies, where the vanquished were paraded. The most serious of offences might even earn the odd offenders the mother of all punishments: public caning (not to be mixed up with public canning, which is even worse). For legal clarity, public caning is caning in public, not caning the public, where public refers to the entire student population of the school, not the entire population of Kinta Valley. The luckless offenders would be caned by the HM or a (reluctant) teacher. I’m still questioning the reformative efficacy of this draconian form of punishment because I could clearly see the cynical and smug smile on their faces as the cane landed on the sweet posteriors. For these unrepentant hard cores, it’s all in a day’s work.

All the underground straw polls run by the students consistently concluded that my Friend was by far the most popular (read disliked, detested, derided), ahead of the hardheaded head-boy. His single-minded and unapologetic approach to law and order had won him legions of followers (read enemies, enemies, enemies). As a straight-thinking and law-loving citizen, I felt this was grossly unfair. Without honest and principled prefects like my Friend, the great school would’ve crumbled and sunk into disorder and decay, eventually losing out to its wholesome and well-behaved neighbour, Sekolah Izzuddin Shah, Ipoh (SISI). Sissy!

No armies in the world can stop an idea whose time has come. Who said this? Hugo Boss? Never mind. One fine day, a flash of brilliance struck one of these so-called followers, who felt something must be done urgently to stop the prefects on their tracks. He started a blog entry on the wall of the toilet, right above the urinals, on the ground floor of the school’s main building. The subject of his blog was, no surprise, my Friend. What he wrote was only slightly milder than pornography, but he seemed to strike the chord. Other followers pitched in, and more followers, and more. The proverbial floodgates crashed in record time. A my Friend thread emerged, and that part of the wall was finally transformed into a flourishing fan site, complete with unflattering comments and caricatures, giving birth to an early form of social network for my Friend’s ardent followers to air and share their rants and rage. As you peed, you pored over the angry entries and clever comments. Toilet trips had never been this good.

Emboldened by the roaring success, more forums and sites emerged, levelling at other heavy-handed honchos in the prefects room. New posts appeared almost every day at any time. No actual names were used, but just like the latter-day social network, it’s a fertile space for the creative mind and the grudging heart. You’d wonder at the variety and choice of words, some were candid and casual, some loud and lewd, all gloriously entertaining. I can assure you that even if you’re a boneless bodger the bookworm without one vein of humour, you’d come out of the toilet smiling, inspired, and ready for English debates. The head-boy and his posse of prefects, for all their strident and gung-ho ways, were now helpless. They knew they’d been hit back, and hard.

So that’s how the social network started. In Kinta Valley, not Silicon Valley.

Note: This retrospective work was inspired, in part, by "The Social Network". Heavily favoured for Best Picture at the recent Academy Awards, it lost to "The King's Speech". The film, however, won an Oscar for Best Film Editing . Just don't ask me what exactly is film editing.