THIS is my small reminiscence and contribution to Hari Kebangsaan 2026 – a remembrance of the muhibbah we once lived almost instinctively, and may now need to choose more deliberately.
Every Malaysian childhood had its own national anthem – not on Spotify, but on the school assembly ground beneath the morning sun.
Mine began with the clang of the bell, the shuffle of Bata shoes and hundreds of young throats clearing as we lined up in perfect disorder.
Then came Negaraku. Some hit the high notes, some the wrong ones, and a few probably hit the boy beside them. Nobody minded. Whatever our musical shortcomings, we sang together.
After that came the state anthem and the school song.
At Sekolah Sultan Abdul Samad, ours rested on two simple words: Belajar. Berbakti. Learn. Serve.
At that age, we understood the first better than the second.
Learning still had to compete with football, comics and the sophisticated science of avoiding homework.
If we forgot the lyrics, there was always the universal Malaysian survival technique: move the lips, look patriotic and mumble confidently.
Monday brought another sacred requirement – the school tie.
Forget it and constitutional rights seemed temporarily suspended.
That was my Malaysia in school uniform: shirts tucked in too tightly, mischief bubbling beneath the surface and friendships forming before we knew how precious they would become.
Before cynicism, there was curiosity. Before politics, there was the padang. And before anyone taught us the word muhibbah, we were already living it.
Malaysia in the schoolyard
My secondary school was in Petaling Jaya, where friendship had no race, although report cards certainly had classifications.
The great division among us was not Malay, Chinese or Indian.
It was Science versus Arts – two tribes occupying the same civilisation and occasionally wondering what on earth the other side did all day.
We studied together, played together and, with reasonable frequency, got into trouble together.
Group projects might have been negotiable; group punishment certainly was not. The school bell was our referee, Parliament and alarm clock rolled into one. When it rang, football stopped, arguments stopped. When the bell spoke, rebels obeyed.
Morning assembly had its own Malaysian orchestra: the squeak of Bata shoes on terrazzo tiles, whispers travelling faster than official announcements, the smell of chalk dust and floor polish and, somewhere nearby, the lingering promise of nasi lemak or mee goreng.
If you listened carefully, you could almost hear Malaysia breathing – one anthem, many accents and hundreds of young lives standing shoulder to shoulder.
We were not always in tune, but somehow, we were in harmony.
Recess diplomacy
If assembly taught patriotism, recess taught foreign relations. Our canteen was probably Malaysia’s earliest functioning model of food diplomacy.
One friend had murukku, another had karipap, while somebody’s fried bee hoon mysteriously disappeared before its rightful owner had completed negotiations.
We traded food with the seriousness of diplomats minus communiques, plus sambal.
Chinese New Year brought oranges, Deepavali brought sweets and Hari Raya brought kuih.
Nobody needed a seminar on multiculturalism before accepting a kuih makmur from a friend.
The important question was rarely, “What race are you?” It was far more likely to be: “Got extra or not?”
There, perhaps, was unity in its simplest form – different homes, different kitchens, one table, same hunger.
Our language was equally Malaysian.
English came generously seasoned with lah, Malay travelled effortlessly between us and an aiyo appeared whenever emotional precision was required.
Grammar occasionally suffered serious injuries, but understanding survived magnificently.
We spoke Manglish or Bahasa Rojak long before anyone considered it a cultural phenomenon.
Unesco has yet to declare my old school corridor a World Heritage Site, but I remain hopeful.
Intent mattered more than tenses. Friendship was fluent.
Teachers who built more than grades
Then there were our teachers.
Every generation remembers them – the one who could detect chewing gum from 20m away, another whose chalk-throwing accuracy deserved national selection, and the eternal optimist who treated homework as a renewable resource, best harvested over weekends.
We feared them, complained about them and, decades later, finally understood them.
Behind every stern instruction, confiscated comic and dreaded “See me after class” was responsibility. They were trying to turn a noisy assortment of children into people.
They taught mathematics, science, languages and history, but also punctuality, manners, resilience, fairness and respect.
Without necessarily writing the word on the blackboard, they taught us muhibbah.
Some of the finest lessons were written not in textbooks but in chalk dust, patience and example.
We borrowed pencils without procurement procedures, erasers changed ownership mysteriously and lunches became communal assets.
Occasionally, eyes wandered sideways during exams. Today, that might be called “collaborative learning”. Our teachers had another description.
Whatever our mischief, arguments rarely lasted. Laughter was contagious and forgiveness usually arrived before the next bell.
We had no WhatsApp or Instagram, yet many friendships endured.
Today, the playground has simply gone digital. Instead of marbles, we exchange photographs, jokes and updates about cholesterol, blood pressure and aching knees.
The hairstyles have changed; remarkably, the friendships have not.
When August came
Then August arrived and classrooms suddenly filled with flags. We coloured the Jalur Gemilang during art lessons, marched in formations and sang patriotic songs with the confidence of people who had no recording contract to lose.
We knew little about geopolitics, constitutional history or the complicated road to independence, but we knew pride.
Our flags might have involved coloured paper, rulers, glue and occasional artistic liberties, but when we shouted “Merdeka!”, we meant it. For those moments, prefects and rebels stood together. Patriotism can produce miracles.
National Day did not feel like somebody else’s celebration. It belonged to us. That school field was Malaysia reduced to its essentials: children from different families, faiths and cultures standing beneath the same sun, singing the same anthem and dreaming, however vaguely, of the same country.
Shared trouble, shared laughter
Childhood unity, of course, was not constructed entirely from noble ideals. Sometimes it came through shared punishment.
I remember one classroom incident when chalk started flying, dusters acquired military applications and somebody’s throw struck a fluorescent light. It broke spectacularly.
Our discipline teacher arrived to find no confession, many guilty faces and enough chalk dust to reconstruct the crime scene. The verdict was immediate: everybody punished.
Nothing produces solidarity quite like collective jeopardy.
Looking back, those punishments may have been our earliest team-building exercises. Today companies spend impressive sums sending executives to resorts for trust exercises.
We learned teamwork kneeling outside classrooms. Our Human Resources department was called Cikgu, and the performance improvement plan was considerably shorter.
Yet those episodes taught loyalty, accountability and something societies sometimes underestimate - the ability to laugh at ourselves. A country whose people can still laugh together has not lost everything.
The United Nations of the padang
After school, another Malaysia emerged on the padang. Football required very little capital expenditure: two slippers became goalposts, school bags marked boundaries, offside was largely theoretical, a foul depended heavily on who was arguing and the referee was usually the biggest boy with the loudest voice.
There were no Malay teams, Chinese teams or Indian teams. There was only the most powerful coalition in school sport: Team Siapa Bawa Bola.
The owner of the football was simultaneously FIFA president, chief selector and Youth and Sports Minister.
But when somebody fell, hands immediately reached down to pull him up. Nobody inspected skin colour before offering one. Bruises were bruises, and friends were friends.
We did not attend unity camps. We lived unity between football passes, puddles and laughter.
When rain came, it did not cancel the match; it improved it. The padang became our Merdeka Cup of Mud, our uniforms returned home resembling camouflage and our mothers greeted us like prosecutors preparing a case.
We competed hard, quarrelled briefly, forgave quickly and went home friends. Perhaps that is one modest definition of muhibbah.
A song far from home
One song from those school years remained with me: Inilah Barisan Kita. We sang it with such conviction that one might have imagined we were defending the nation rather than waiting impatiently for recess.
Years later, I found myself far from Petaling Jaya, studying at Cambridge. Among Malaysian students - scholars, dreamers and slightly homesick young people - that familiar song surfaced again. For a moment, England felt closer to home.
The surroundings had changed, the accents multiplied and our lives had moved far beyond the school padang, but the feeling remained familiar.
Malaysia travels strangely well inside the heart. Sometimes home is not geography; sometimes it is a song.
From nostalgia to responsibility
Nearly seven decades after Merdeka, I sometimes wonder what became of the simplicity we once knew. Childhood was never perfect, and Malaysia had tensions then as it does now. Muhibbah should not be romanticised as though we once lived inside a perpetual National Day advertisement.
But something genuine existed: we knew one another personally, not as categories. The Malay boy was the friend who lent you his ruler, the Indian boy the classmate who beat everyone in language, and the Chinese boy your goalkeeper. Difference had names, faces, jokes and lunch boxes.
That matters because prejudice grows more easily at a distance. Friendship complicates stereotypes.
It is harder to dislike an entire community when one of its members once shared his mother’s murukku, defended your goalpost or helped you survive algebra.
Perhaps that is why schools still matter so deeply to Malaysia. Education is not only about grades, university places or employability.
It is also where future citizens first learn to live with one another - every classroom a small bridge, every padang common ground, every canteen table a quiet lesson in citizenship.
Muhibbah must become a verb
As we mark Hari Kebangsaan 2026, the lesson from those old classrooms is not that we should retreat nostalgically into the past. We cannot.
Malaysia has changed, technology has changed, schools have changed and our conversations have changed. Today’s classrooms have smartboards, tablets and Wi-Fi stronger than some students’ attention spans.
Yet human beings remain remarkably analogue. We still need friendship, trust, respect and the willingness to sit beside someone different from us and discover that difference is not danger.
Muhibbah cannot survive merely as a pleasant word printed beneath a Jalur Gemilang every August. Muhibbah must become a verb. It has to be practised in schools, workplaces, neighbourhoods, places of worship, online conversations and around dinner tables.
Perhaps most importantly, it must be reflected in how we speak about fellow Malaysians when they are not in the room.
Tolerance is useful, but friendship asks more of us. Tolerance says, “I can live beside you.” Muhibbah says, “I am glad you are here.”
That is a far more ambitious national project, and it does not belong only to governments, politicians, teachers or institutions. It belongs to us.
When the bell rings again
Today I still miss the chalk dust, the school padang and hundreds of imperfect young voices singing together. We were classmates first, Malaysians forever.
The bell never asked our race, the canteen did not assign tables by ethnicity, and the football did not care which language we spoke.
Then came the final bell. School ended and life scattered us - abroad, into careers and families.
Yet in reunion photographs, memories and old WhatsApp groups, that bell still rings.
It reminds me that Malaysia’s greatest hope lies not only in grand declarations, but also in small things - a shared meal, a helping hand, an old friend remembered, a song sung together, and the choice to see another Malaysian first as a fellow human being.
That is the Malaysia I remember and still believe in. Muhibbah once came almost naturally; today, we may need to choose it deliberately.
So this Merdeka, let the old school bell ring again - calling us not backwards, but forward to the Malaysia we can still become.
Muhibbah we must. Muhibbah we shall strive.
Joseph Tek Choon Yee has over 30 years of experience in the plantation industry, with a strong background in oil palm research and development, C-suite leadership and industry advocacy. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
