AN Uzbek student from a university in Uzbekistan has won the international speakers' category of Malaysia's Prime Minister's Cup International Bahasa Melayu Public Speaking Competition.
Compare that with the inability of some Malaysians who can't or won't speak their own national language, and we should hang our heads in shame. At the start of the Melaka election recently, a young candidate caused a brief scandal during a media interview when she appeared to not be able to speak the national language.
Her later attempt to demonstrate that she could, also failed to convince. The Uzbek winner has been studying Bahasa Melayu as a second language twice a week for four years. So, what excuse is there for any Malaysian who has undergone at least 11 years of national language classes to not at least be able to speak conversational Malay?
People who are successful at learning another language are those who believe it to be valuable. Migrant workers in Malaysia, for instance, pick up the language quickly because without it, how are they to communicate with the locals for their everyday needs?
The staff of this newspaper write in English, but government meetings and press conferences, and interviews with government officials and the common man are often conducted in the national language.
That's just how life works. And so, the person who doesn't make the effort to speak and understand Bahasa Malaysia voluntarily — and foolishly — restricts his interactions with fellow Malaysians, and limits his world view of his own country and countrymen.
Perhaps the reason it is easier for foreign students, expatriates and migrant workers to pick up the language is that they are not tripped up by racial baggage.
But, though Bahasa Malaysia, as its name denotes, was originally the language of the Malay people, since 1957, it has been the national language of this country — so, it belongs to every Malaysian.
After all, no one questions why the language of the English is the national language in England. Would British cabinet members Sajid Javid, Rishi Sunak or Priti Patel have got as far as they had in their careers if they had not learned to speak the national language?
And while it is true that all three of them were born in England, isn't that true of most Malaysians, too? Successful non-Malay politicians speak fluent Bahasa Malaysia, and that should not be seen as an extraordinary fact.
As a nation built on generations of migrants from all over Asia and the Middle East, the Malaysian national language is interwoven with words from everywhere its people originated. We should take pride in that and not be shy or afraid to own it.
And we should not let anyone tell us that our use of the national language is an insult to the Malay people. (And even if it is, at least it is in the national language!).
Without a common language to bind us all, we will not communicate and socialise with, or know each other. And if we do not truly get to know each other beyond the stereotypes, the other becomes the bogeyman.
At some point, we all need to lay down our arms despite whatever real or perceived hurt and start all over again. If we can undo this baggage in our minds, perhaps we will be able to remove one layer of what keeps us apart.