There has been much discussion recently about how Malaysia came about and even what Malaysia is.
It started in Sabah and Sarawak but has spread to some academics and non-governmental organisations in the peninsula.
The same thing can mean different things to others. But surely there are some things all Malaysians can agree on?
One such thing, and probably the most fundamental, is Bapa Malaysia Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra al-Haj.
It will soon be 34 years since Tunku's death on Dec 6, 1990.
The government secretariat building in Kuching is called Wisma Bapa Malaysia, where a life-size bust of Tunku greets all entering it.
A thoroughfare fronting the Kuching Waterfront is named Jalan Tunku Abdul Rahman.
A prominent housing estate in Miri is called Taman Tunku, not to be confused with Tunku Abdul Rahman Park in Gaya Bay, off Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.
Before Malaysia Day, Tunku was widely known as the happiest prime minister in the world.
But fate and the geopolitics of the day intervened.
One fine day in 1961, Tunku announced to the world the very idea of Malaysia.
Britain was retrenching economically and militarily "east of Suez" and mulling what to do with one of its most strategic colonial outposts — Singapore — and colonies in Borneo.
The concern on the ground in Malaya and the Borneo states then was that merging with Singapore, with its more economically advanced ethnic-Chinese majority, would upset not just the fraught ethnic balance in Malaya, but also put Borneo natives in the shade.
Singapore's founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, took up the cudgels for a merger of Malaya with Singapore and the Borneo states of Sabah, Sarawak and Brunei.
He crisscrossed the Borneo states and pushed the idea of Malaysia to largely sceptical local audiences.
Against conflicting cross-currents, not to mention Indonesia's opposition to the idea of Malaysia as a "neo-colonialist plot", it fell on Tunku, with his well-known generosity of spirit, to make the idea of Malaysia a reality.
He thus richly deserves the mantle of Bapa Malaysia.
Moreover, Sarawak then was wracked by a communist insurgency that ended only in 1973.
The May 13, 1969, riots in Kuala Lumpur had resulted in emergency rule being declared, and Tunku gave way to Tun Abdul Razak Hussein.
An aged and increasingly frail Tunku still made frequent trips to Sarawak.
My most vivid memory was of him — looking pensive and hands resting on his walking stick (a far cry from the jolly PM he used to be) — in a limousine going to Kuching Airport. He died a week later.
We owe it to Tunku to overcome whatever challenges and disagreements we have today and take Malaysia to greater heights.
We have overcome far worse and come off far better than other former colonies that had gained independence about the same time we did.
Malaysia is far from perfect. The journey to perfection is never-ending but we can get closer to it only if we set aside our diffe-rences and make compromises.
That is the Malaysian way to real and lasting success.
* The writer views developments in the nation, region and wider world from his vantage point in Kuching