Rosmah and her biography

Is being Najib’s wife a good reason for Rosmah to claim as being famous in her own right?

COMMENT

I have always wanted to live in a big house with guards at the gates. Only those that I wish to see will be given entry.

I want to be driven in a car with outriders flanking the car left, right, back and front and helicopters in the air, tracking my every move on the off-chance that some oddball out there wants to make life unpleasant for me because of my decadent lifestyle.

I want untold millions to be at my disposal to be disposed of in foreign land in foreign shops with foreign-designed handbags, shoes and dresses.

There are also causes I wish to champion, charities I want to support and social injustice I want to fight for lest they think me frivolous in my ways and decadent for my indulgence.

Sounds familiar?

Are these not the ways of our First Lady of Malaysia (FLOM)? And why should you begrudge Rosmah Mansor for her vanities and her self-indulgence when she knows no better? When no one – not her acquaintances, not her friends and certainly least of all, her husband – has seen it to be their responsibility to tell her that the things she does and the manner of her life are not becoming of a FLOM? Rosmah knows no better herself!

And that is the tragedy of our FLOM.

She is a caricature of the FLOM she aspires to be. She perceives herself to be the very epitome of our FLOM when we know she is not.

What she so desperately aspires to be she is not. What she thinks she is, we know she is not. Only common sense, a supportive and responsible husband would tell her what she is not – and to her tragedy all this she has not.

And so now she goes onto her next faux pas – a biography, whenever it is ready for public reading!

A biography is a detailed description or account of someone’s life. It entails more than basic facts (education, work, relationships, and death); a biography also portrays a subject’s experience of these events.

Like a profile or curriculum vitae (résumé), a biography presents a subject’s life story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of a subject’s personality.

Famous in her own right?

My dear Rosmah, what is your life work that may be of interest to us all? Your contribution to nation-building? I think not.

Visiting heads of states who are too polite to decline your own invitation to visit them? I think not.

And having an Islamic fashion show in Monaco hardly passes for any meaningful contribution to our nation-building.

Did you contribute to Najib’s rise to become an unelected prime minister of Malaysia? You may detail your magnificent efforts in persuading Najib to oust Pak Lah (Abdullah Ahmad Badawi) from office way before Pak Lah was ready to go, but I sure Dr Mahathir Mohamad would have something to say on that.

What does a FLOM have left to do but commission her own biography? But the collective sigh of boredom and apathy that has greeted the announcement of this biography has been deafening.

As for biographies by wives of prime ministers, about the only one I would be interested in borrowing from the library to peruse would be one of Margaret Trudeau – and that too only for more details of her dalliances with Ted Kennedy and also Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones during their visit Canada while her husband was prime minister.

You see, Rosmah, people write their biographies not to tell us what we already know of them but to tell us of things that we do not know of them.

I do not know how it is possible for you and Najib – two people who were married to other people – could eventually find the time and make the effort to get to know each other and eventually marry. That would make for interesting reading!

Why do anybody write a biography? Because that person is famous enough for there to be people who would want to know more about that person.

Now what is Rosmah’s famous for? I am tempted to elaborate on this but I think I would leave it to others to have their say on this.

And, for the sake of brevity, I would like to point out that being Najib’s wife is no reason for Rosmah to claim as being famous in her own right.

CT Ali is a reformist who believes in Pakatan Rakyat’s ideologies. He is a FMT columnist.